R&D Software Intern

R&D Software Intern | Community Isolation Analysis Speedup

Urban Intelligence

Urban Intelligence exists to tackle climate change and support communities. We enable evidence-based decisions for a resilient future, working with councils, central government, iwi, and infrastructure managers who make critical decisions about climate and natural hazard risks. Our platform, the Resilience Explorer, turns data into shared, continuously updated risk intelligence that drives real decisions across Aotearoa New Zealand and worldwide.

The opportunity

We are looking for a student to join our engineering and data teams on a focused R&D project to speed up our community isolation analysis. This analysis identifies when communities are cut off from critical infrastructure and services during modelled climate and natural hazard events, helping our clients plan disaster response and target mitigations. It is powerful but computationally expensive, and we believe smart use of graph analysis can cut processing time and cost by close to 90%.

You will research and implement these strategies within our risk evaluation codebase, measuring your impact against real run time and computational efficiency. It is genuine R&D, with uncertainty, room to experiment, and a result that ships.

What you'll gain

• Hands-on experience applying graph analysis and algorithm design to real infrastructure networks
• Skills in performance profiling and optimisation, measured against CPU, memory, and storage
• Mentoring from our technical team and exposure to commercial R&D practice
• A supportive, mission-driven team that cares about the work and about you

What we're looking for

• Comfortable writing and reading code, and keen to learn
• Curious, systematic, and happy working through problems where the answer isn't known in advance
• Interested in using technology to help communities respond to climate and natural hazard risks

Eligibility

This internship is funded through an R&D Experience Grant, so you must:

• Have studied or be studying at a New Zealand tertiary education institute. Study completed overseas does not qualify.
• Be studying at NZQA level 6 to 10, or have finished study within the last 12 months (the closing date of your final semester must be less than 12 months ago).
• Be studying science, technology, engineering, design, or business.
• Be legally permitted to work in New Zealand.

The details

• 400 hours total, at 40 hours per week (around 10 weeks full-time)
• Paid at $29.90 per hour
• In-person at our central Christchurch office
• Working alongside our engineering and data teams