
Working Student / Intern: Software Engineer (Frontend & Backend) (f/m/x)
Required skills
Job description
ilert posted this role. Below, we break down what it means for a working student in Cologne: your weekly hours, take-home pay and visa limits. You can also open ChatGPT or Claude with a ready-made prompt to tailor your CV, check your fit, draft a cover letter or prep for the interview.
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Description provided by ilert
Cologne, Germany (Hybrid)
Team: Engineering · Reports to: CTO · Format: Working Student (16–20h/week) or Internship (3–6 months)
Keep the world awake - build the platform thousands of DevOps teams rely on
ilert helps thousands of DevOps & IT teams detect, fix, and communicate incidents faster. When a critical system goes down, our platform is the "source of truth" — from the resilient backend that processes thousands of events per second to the fast, intuitive frontend engineers stare at under pressure.
We are looking for a Working Student or Intern who loves building software and doesn't want to be boxed into a single layer of the stack. Whether you lean frontend, backend, or full-stack, you'll ship production code that powers a mission-critical SaaS product. We match projects to your strengths and our business needs — and we're happy to help you grow in whichever direction excites you most.
Tasks
- Ship End-to-End Features: Build user-facing features with React and TypeScript, the backend APIs behind them, or both.
- Backend & Scale: Help design robust APIs and data pipelines in our backend stack (we mainly use Java and Rust) and work with distributed systems like Kafka and ClickHouse.
- Frontend & Craft: Contribute to our modular component library and help keep the UI fast, accessible, and rock-solid when customers need it most.
- Flexible Project Scope: From core alerting logic to integrations (Slack, MS Teams, Jira) to AI-powered SRE features — we'll match the work to your interests.
- Quality & Reliability: Write tests and care about clean, maintainable code on a platform where downtime isn't an option.
Requirements
- Current Student: Enrolled in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Informatics, or a related technical field.
- Coding Foundation: Hands-on experience with at least one part of our stack — React/TypeScript on the frontend and/or a backend language like Java, Go, Rust, Python, or Node.js.
- CS Fundamentals: A solid grasp of data structures, algorithms, and how web applications fit together (APIs, databases, Git).
- Engineering Mindset: You value clean, maintainable code and are eager to learn how a professional SaaS product is built, tested, and deployed at scale.
- Curiosity & Builder Mentality: Bonus points for side projects, open source, or anything you've built and shipped — backend, frontend, or AI.
- Language: Fluent English (our working language).
Benefits
- 🚀 High Impact: Your code helps engineers at companies worldwide stay calm and efficient during incidents.
- 🧭 Pick Your Path: Explore frontend, backend, or full-stack — and find what you love before you graduate.
- 🏡 Hybrid Freedom: Experience our beautiful office in Cologne Rheinauhafen (3 days/week) and work from home (2 days/week).
- 🕒 Student-Centric: Flexible hours that work around your lectures and exam periods.
- 🎓 Elite Mentorship: Work directly with experienced engineers who love to share what they know.
- 🌴 Focus Culture: We protect "maker time," favor async communication, and keep meeting overhead low.
We hire for talent and a "builder" mentality, not just a checklist. If you have a GitHub repo or a project you're proud of — a slick UI, a fast API, or an AI experiment that connects to the real world — we definitely want to see it!
Working student essentials
What this Tech working student role in Cologne means for you: the weekly-hours rules, the social-contribution perks, and what international students should check before applying.
Weekly hours
Working students may work up to 20 hours a week during the semester and full-time during the breaks. Staying within this keeps your student status and the Werkstudent benefits.
Working student rulesSocial contributions
Under the Werkstudentenprivileg you're exempt from health, care and unemployment insurance contributions — only pension insurance applies. That leaves more net pay than a regular job.
Check your insuranceInternational students
Non-EU students can work 140 full or 280 half days per year (raised from 120/240 in March 2024). A working student contract usually fits within this — confirm the exact limits printed on your residence permit.
Studying in Germany