The Ethereum Foundation has opened applications for the 2026 Internship Program: a paid, full-time opportunity to work directly with teams advancing the Ethereum protocol and ecosystem.
Interns will join EF teams for 12 weeks over the summer, contributing to active R&D and ecosystem-oriented projects across a wide range of focus areas. The internship is open to candidates worldwide and can be completed remotely or from EF’s offices. A summer meetup will bring the cohort together to connect in person.
The Goal
Ethereum continues to evolve; each upgrade, research initiative, and experiment depends on people willing to dive into complex problems and help build what comes next. The internship is designed to give emerging engineers and researchers a practical path into that work. Interns contribute to real projects under the guidance of experienced mentors within Ethereum’s open, collaborative environment.
Who Should Apply
The program is intended for university students or recent graduates passionate about Ethereum, open-source contributions, and decentralized technologies. High-signal candidates will already have some understanding of Ethereum at a technical level and want to deepen that understanding through applied work. Applicants should be self-directed and comfortable exploring unfamiliar systems.
Application Process
Applications are open now through December 1, 2025. Shortlisted candidates will then be invited to interviews over the next two months, with final selections announced by early February. The internship runs for approximately 12 weeks during the summer, with flexible start and end dates to match academic calendars.
2026 Internship Roles
Teams across the EF are seeking interns. Each role is connected to an EF team or initiative with active projects. Candidates should review the full listings on the EF job board for details on scope, preferred skills, and example tasks.
Cryptography Research
The EF cryptography research team designs and analyzes cryptographic primitives critical to Ethereum’s roadmap, advises protocol and client teams on security choices, and publishes peer-reviewed results that keep Ethereum at the bleeding edge of cryptography research.
DevOps
EthPandaOps helps ensure a well tested, coordinated, and safe fork on Ethereum. They achieve these goals via custom tooling, deployment scripts, and data collection pipelines. Additionally, EthPandaOps aims to empower the community to repurpose tools for their own needs, reducing overall effort while ensuring minimal standards.
Funding Coordination
The Strategic Funding Coordination team helps EF grantees and other essential public goods projects secure co-funding from ecosystem grants, government programs, philanthropic organizations, and select commercial partners.
Geth (Go-Ethereum)
The go-ethereum team builds Geth, an Ethereum execution-layer client written in Go. Within the EF, they do research and development of the Ethereum protocol. As core developers, they shape the protocol and judge external contributions.
P2P Networking
The P2P Networking team addresses a proven bottleneck in Ethereum today: the networking layer. They work on two fronts: improving the current stack to deliver on Ethereum’s short and medium-term ambitions while conducting radical, first-principles thinking to redesign the networking layer from scratch for long-term scalability and growth. They collaborate closely with client implementers, researchers, and libp2p maintainers across the ecosystem.
Protocol Consensus
The Protocol Consensus team’s mission is to bridge the gap between the guarantees provided by Ethereum’s consensus protocol today and those necessary to fully support the network’s long-term values and objectives. To move toward this goal, they focus on activities such as protocol design, theoretical analysis, specification writing, academia engagement and collaboration with the broader ecosystem to ensure that ideas can be translated into practice.
Protocol Prototyping
The Protocol Prototyping team builds end-to-end implementations of new ideas for Ethereum’s core protocol. By turning concepts into working prototypes, the team explores how potential upgrades behave in practice, helping the community move beyond theory and speculation. Their work tests assumptions, quantifies trade-offs, and uncovers risks that may not be apparent from research alone.
Protocol Security
The Protocol Security Research team safeguards Ethereum’s integrity. Through coordination, meticulous code reviews, developing advanced tooling, and real-world simulations, the team focuses on securing the network and its critical components. Their hands-on approach includes managing the bug bounty program, continuously monitoring the network, and collaborating with client teams.
Protocol Snarkification
The Protocol Snarkification is dedicated to snarkifying the Ethereum protocol, alongside the Cryptography and zkEVM teams. In particular, the team has a focus on formal verification applied to cryptographic protocols and their implementations.
Protocol Specs & Testing
The Specifications and Testing for the Ethereum Execution Layer (STEEL) team consists mainly of two projects: Ethereum Execution Layer Specification (EELS) and Ethereum Execution Specification Tests (EEST).
The EELS project is responsible for the main Ethereum protocol reference specification written in Python, which aims towards replacing the yellow-paper specification and being a crucial aid to the EIP process in order 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 also supports testing efforts for the consensus-specs, takes care of maintaining and improving the tooling, frameworks, documentation and guidance required to facilitate the client developers with the consumption of the tests.
Robust Incentives Group
The Robust Incentives Group (RIG) is a research team dedicated to the study of the Ethereum protocol through the lens of mechanism design. Their work maps all the ways that incentives directly or indirectly affect Ethereum participants. Where possible, the team proposes mechanisms to achieve incentive compatibility and system optimality.
Stateless Consensus
Stateless Consensus builds advanced prototypes and tools with the primary objective of ushering in a stateless Ethereum era, which will make Ethereum more scalable, usable, and ubiquitous.
zkEVM
Bringing zkEVMs to the Ethereum layer 1 is a multi-faceted effort. The zkEVM team’s work is organized into three core workstreams; real-time proving, client and protocol integration, and economic incentives and security.
A Path Into the Protocol Layer
The EF Internship Program offers an entry point into protocol-level work. It’s an opportunity to contribute meaningfully while gaining experience, mentorship, and context for how Ethereum is maintained and advanced.
If you’re ready to spend your summer building Ethereum, explore the open positions and apply now at:
👉 jobs.lever.co/ethereumfoundation
