The Ethereum Foundation is now accepting applications for its 2026 internship program. This is a paid, full-time opportunity to work directly with the team driving the Ethereum protocol and ecosystem forward.
Interns will join the EF team for 12 weeks over the summer, contributing to active research and development and ecosystem-oriented projects across a wide range of focus areas. Internships are open to candidates worldwide and can be completed remotely or from an EF office. Summer meetups bring friends together and connect in person.
the goal
Ethereum continues to evolve. Each upgrade, research initiative, and experiment depends on people willing to tackle complex problems and help build what comes next. This internship is designed to give up-and-coming engineers and researchers a practical path to the job. Interns will contribute to real-world projects under the guidance of experienced mentors within Ethereum’s open and collaborative environment.
Who should apply?
This program is aimed at college students or recent graduates who are passionate about Ethereum, open source contributions, and decentralized technologies. High Signal candidates already have some understanding of Ethereum on a technical level and want to deepen that understanding through applied work. Applicants must be able to independently and comfortably explore unfamiliar systems.
Application process
Applications are accepted until December 1, 2025. Shortlisted candidates will be invited for interviews over the next two months, with the final selection announced by early February. Internships run approximately 12 weeks during the summer and have flexible start and end dates to fit your academic calendar.
Internship roles in 2026
Teams across EF are recruiting interns. Each role is associated with an EF team or active project initiative. Candidates should check the complete list on the EF job board for details on scope, preferred skills, and example tasks.
Cryptography research
The EF Cryptographic Research team designs and analyzes cryptographic primitives important to Ethereum’s roadmap, advises protocol and client teams on security choices, and publishes peer-reviewed results that keep Ethereum at the cutting edge of cryptographic research.
👉 apply
DevOps
EthPandaOps helps ensure well-tested, coordinated, and secure forks on Ethereum. These goals are achieved through custom tools, deployment scripts, and data collection pipelines. Additionally, EthPandaOps aims to enable the community to reuse tools for their own needs, reducing overall effort while ensuring minimum standards.
👉 apply
Financing arrangements
The Strategic Funding Coordination Team helps EF grant recipients and other important public goods projects secure co-funding from ecosystem grants, government programs, philanthropic organizations, and selected commercial partners.
👉 apply
Guess (Go Ethereum)
The go-ethereum team builds Geth, an Ethereum execution layer client written in Go. Within EF, we conduct research and development of the Ethereum protocol. As core developers, they shape the protocol and judge outside contributions.
👉 apply
P2P networking
The P2P Networking team is addressing a proven bottleneck in Ethereum today: the networking layer. They are working on two aspects. One is to implement fundamental first-principles thinking to improve the current stack to realize Ethereum’s short- and medium-term goals, while redesigning the networking layer from the ground up for long-term scalability and growth. They work closely with client implementers, researchers, and libp2p maintainers across the ecosystem.
👉 apply
protocol consensus
The Protocol Consensus Team’s mission is to bridge the gap between the guarantees provided by Ethereum’s consensus protocol today and the guarantees needed to fully support the long-term value and purpose of the network. To move towards this goal, we focus on activities such as protocol design, theoretical analysis, specification writing, engagement with academia, and collaboration with the broader ecosystem to ensure ideas are put into practice.
👉 apply
Protocol prototyping
The protocol prototyping team builds end-to-end implementations of new ideas for Ethereum’s core protocols. By turning concepts into working prototypes, the team investigates how potential upgrades work in practice and helps the community move beyond theory and speculation. Their research tests assumptions, quantifies trade-offs, and uncovers risks that may not be obvious from research alone.
👉 apply
Protocol security
The Protocol Security Research Team protects the integrity of Ethereum. Through tuning, thorough code reviews, advanced tool development, and real-world simulations, the team focuses on the security of networks and their critical components. Their hands-on approach includes managing bug bounty programs, continuously monitoring networks, and collaborating with client teams.
👉 apply
Protocol snarkification
Protocol Snarkification, along with the Crypto and zkEVM teams, specializes in snarkification of the Ethereum protocol. In particular, the team focuses on formal verification applied to cryptographic protocols and their implementations.
👉 apply
Protocol specification and testing
The Ethereum Execution Layer (STEEL) team’s specification and testing consists of two main projects: Ethereum Execution Layer Specification (EELS) and Ethereum Execution Specification Testing (EEST).
- The EELS project is responsible for the main Ethereum protocol reference specification written in Python. This specification replaces the yellow paper specification and is intended to be an important aid in the EIP process to provide a prototyping framework for new updates.
- The EEST project is responsible for the Ethereum protocol reference tests used by all clients to detect consensus issues during new hard fork implementations and regressions.
The team is also responsible for maintaining and improving the tools, frameworks, documentation, and guidance necessary to support consensus specification testing efforts and make testing readily available to client developers.
👉 apply
strong incentive group
Robust Incentives Group (RIG) is a research team dedicated to studying the Ethereum protocol through the lens of mechanism design. Their research maps all the ways incentives impact Ethereum participants, directly or indirectly. Where possible, the team proposes mechanisms to achieve incentive compatibility and system optimality.
👉 apply
zkEVM
Bringing zkEVM to Ethereum Layer 1 requires a multifaceted effort. The zkEVM team’s work consists of three main workstreams. Real-time proof, client and protocol integration, economic incentives and security.
👉 apply
path to protocol layer
The EF Internship Program provides an entryway into protocol-level work. This is an opportunity to contribute meaningfully while gaining experience, guidance, and context in maintaining and developing Ethereum.
If you’re ready to spend your summer building Ethereum, check out our open positions and apply today at:
👉 jobs.lever.co/ethereumfoundation
