Internship UI/UX Design & Development

UI/UX Design & Development Internship (m/f/d) at VISS

Karlsruhe, Germany | Mandatory internship (Pflichtpraktikum) only | 3 to 6 months | On-site | Starting September/October | Stipend 800 EUR per month

Straight talk first

This is not an internship where you recolour buttons someone else already decided on. You will own interface work across four surfaces of a deep-tech product that ships to defence, healthcare and critical infrastructure customers. What you design gets built, gets audited, and gets used by people whose job depends on reading a security state correctly under pressure.

The pace is high. For much of what you will touch there is no playbook and no competitor to copy from, because nobody has built this interface before. You will be wrong sometimes, in public, in front of the leadership team. In exchange you compress years of learning into a few months, with direct mentoring from the founders.

Why interface work at VISS is not decoration

We sell hardware security to organisations that test us technically before they believe us. Our interface has to make an invisible property, whether this machine is actually protected right now, legible in under two seconds, to a soldier, a hospital IT administrator, and a government procurement officer, all of whom have different tolerances for ambiguity.Get that wrong and the product is unusable regardless of how good the silicon is. This is the part of the company where physics becomes something a human can act on. You sit in it.

What you will do

• The split is roughly 70 % design, 30 % implementation. You design in Figma, and you build enough of it yourself that your handoffs are grounded in what is actually feasible.Companion App. The interface most customers touch first. Pairing, device status, alerts, recovery flows. You take these from problem statement through wireframe and Figma spec to engineering handoff, and you sit in the reviews where they get torn apart.
• Device UI / embedded HMI. The hardest constraint set in the building: small screen, minimal input, security-critical states that must never be misread. Almost no prior art exists. This is where you will do your most original work.
• Management console. Fleet and device administration for enterprise and public-sector customers. Dense data, role models, audit trails, permission boundaries. Designing for the administrator who manages 400 devices, not the one who manages one.
• Website and marketing frontend. viss.cc, landing pages, campaign pages. This is where most of your 30 % implementation lives. You design it, then you ship it.
• Design system. Tokens, components, states and documentation that hold across all four surfaces. Right now this is thinner than we would like. You will help build it.

On the code: you work in the repo, open pull requests, and get reviewed by engineers who will tell you plainly what is wrong. We do not expect you to arrive as a strong engineer. We expect you to leave as a better one.

What we build

VISS develops the next generation of hardware security devices: a physical protection layer that shields computers from cyberattacks, critical for defence, healthcare and critical infrastructure. Winner of the German StartUp Cup (Cybersecurity), EU Cybersecurity Innovator of the Year 2025 and 2026. Supported by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space, the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, the KASTEL Security Research Labs (KIT) and NATO (via NATO DIANA).

Who you will work with

A team that has shipped real, complex hardware-software systems, not just apps: developers of tank targeting sights, ex-robotics founders, an F1 steering wheel developer, chip designers with 20+ years of experience. You will be the person in the room arguing for the user, often against people who understand the machine better than you do.

What you get

• Unfiltered access. You sit in the meetings that matter, see every decision, and understand every mistake.
• Real ownership. No busywork. You own surfaces end to end, and your name is on them.
• A steep curve. Deep tech, security-critical UX, embedded constraints, design systems, frontend implementation, compressed.
• Portfolio. Work that is shipped, defensible, and unusual enough that people will ask you about it in every future interview.
• Network and reference. Direct exposure to VCs, government officials and enterprise customers, plus a personal reference from the founder.
• A path forward. Working student position or a full role after graduation, if the fit is there.

What you bring

• Enrolled in a programme in interaction design, HCI, media informatics, computer science, industrial design or a related field, and your study regulations must require a mandatory internship (Pflichtpraktikum). This one is not negotiable; see "Terms".
• A portfolio that shows your thinking, not only your output. We care more about how you got to a screen than how the screen looks.
• Fluency in Figma: components, variants, auto layout, prototyping, and specs an engineer can actually build from.
• Enough HTML, CSS and JavaScript or TypeScript to implement your own components, and comfort working in git.
• Structured, self-directed working style. You think ahead and you ask when you do not know.
• English at a professional level. German is useful but not required. Our working language with you will be English.

Nice to have, not required: accessibility standards (WCAG, BITV); experience designing for embedded, industrial or hardware interfaces; motion and prototyping tools; React or a comparable framework; interest in cybersecurity or defence technology.

You do not tick every box? Apply anyway. We care how you think and how fast you learn, not about a perfect CV.

Terms

• Type: Mandatory internship (Pflichtpraktikum) only, as required by your study regulations. This is a hard requirement, not a preference. We cannot host voluntary, orientation or post-graduation internships in this role under any circumstances. If your programme does not mandate an internship, please do not apply. We will ask for the relevant excerpt of your study regulations before we make an offer.
• Duration: 3 to 6 months, matching the period your study regulations require. Start as soon as possible.
• Location: Karlsruhe, on-site. This is not a remote or hybrid role. The hardware is here, and so is the team.
• Hours: 40 hours per week.
• Stipend: 600 to 800 EUR per month, depending on duration and the hours your programme requires. To be precise about what that is: a mandatory internship is exempt from the German statutory minimum wage (§ 22 (1) no. 1 MiLoG), so this is a voluntary contribution from us towards your living costs, not a salary. We would rather state that plainly than let you discover it in the contract.

How to apply

Send to [email protected]:

• Your CV
• A short statement (max. 300 words): why you, why now, why VISS?
• A portfolio link with two or three case studies. At least one should be a project you both designed and implemented yourself, however small. Write two sentences on each explaining what was actually your part.

No filler. We reply within 5 working days. The process is a maximum of three conversations plus one small design task on a real problem of ours.

VISS is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications regardless of gender, origin, age, religion, disability or sexual identity. What counts is your drive and your ability to solve problems.