Product Management Intern

About the role

Parallel Systems is seeking a Product Intern to help shape the software platform that our team, operators, and rail partners use to run an autonomous freight network. This is a hands-on role for someone who wants to own a real product problem, not shadow one.

You will sit at the intersection of engineering, operations, and customers. You will talk to users, dig into data, define requirements, and work side by side with software engineers to scope and ship a feature on our platform.

The right person is technical enough to earn engineers' trust, curious enough to understand how rail and logistics actually work, and comfortable bringing structure to ambiguous problems.

What You Will Work On

You will own a specific product problem on our software platform, scoped to team priorities. Example areas include:

• User and customer research: interviewing operators, rail partners, and internal teams to understand workflows and pain points
• Requirements and specs: turning research into clear problem statements, user stories, and requirements engineers can build from
• Feature delivery: working with engineering and design to scope, prioritize, build, and launch a feature on the platform
• Fleet operations workflows: improving how users monitor, dispatch, and manage vehicles and freight through our tools
• Data and metrics: defining success metrics, querying fleet and usage data, and turning findings into product decisions
• Roadmap input: assessing opportunities, competitive landscape, and tradeoffs to inform what the team builds next

Additional information

You will work through a structured product lifecycle: discovery, problem definition, requirements, delivery with engineering, launch, and measuring results.

What to Expect

• Weeks 1-2: Onboarding, overview of our vehicles, operations, and software platform, shadowing engineers and operators, and tool and data access setup
• Weeks 3-4: Project assignment, user interviews and discovery, and a written problem statement reviewed with your mentor
• Weeks 5-7: Requirements and spec writing, prioritization with engineering, and early design or prototype reviews
• Weeks 8-10: Supporting build and testing with the engineering team, user feedback sessions, and iteration on scope
• Weeks 11-12: Launch or handoff, measurement of early results, documentation of findings and recommended next steps, and a presentation to the broader team

Progress will be tracked through weekly check-ins with your mentor, spec and design reviews, and feedback from engineering, operations, and users.

Basic Requirements

• Currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Industrial Engineering, or a related technical field
• Hands-on product, engineering, or startup experience through internships, student teams, research, or personal projects
• Enough technical fluency to read code, understand system architecture, and discuss tradeoffs with engineers
• Experience working with data, such as writing SQL or analyzing data in Python or spreadsheets
• Strong written communication, including the ability to write clear, concise specs and documents
• Ability to bring structure to ambiguous problems and drive work forward with limited direction
• Excitement about working in a hard-tech environment where software meets physical vehicles and real operations

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior software engineering or product management internship, or experience shipping a software product at a startup or on a student team
• Experience conducting user interviews or usability testing and translating findings into requirements
• Experience building prototypes or simple apps, or comfort with design tools such as Figma
• Familiarity with B2B, enterprise, or operations software
• Interest in logistics, transportation, rail, robotics, or industrial technology
• Experience from hands-on extracurricular engineering teams such as Formula SAE, robotics, autonomous systems teams, or similar
• Strong documentation habits and attention to detail

Additional information

Please note the hourly range in the job posting reflects the new hire hourly range across levels that would be applicable to the position. Final compensation will be commensurate with the candidate's final level. Also, this range represents base compensation only and does not include equity or benefits, if applicable.