We’re building the protein breweries of the future. Our process is up to 5,000× more land-efficient than animal or plant protein. In the coming years, we’ll run our first commercial facilities producing thousands of tonnes of protein.

This internship is about the software that runs them. The code that holds a live culture at temperature, meters its feed, and doesn’t get to crash.

What BrewControl is

BrewControl is our next-generation bioprocess control system, and it’s Rust top to bottom: it talks to pumps, scales and sensors and runs an in-house DSL with a custom compiler and runtime that our fermentation scientists use to describe a process.

The role

This is systems engineering with physical consequences. Your control loop runs against a stainless steel vessel in the same building. When a driver drops a frame, a pump fails. When it’s right, a culture grows, and it grows because your code held.

That feedback loop — write it, deploy it, walk downstairs, watch it move a real actuator — is the whole reason this internship is worth doing. Very few software engineers ever get it.

You’ll take real ownership from your first week. Not a ticket queue: a project.

What you’ll own

One central project, yours end to end. See three ideas below: which one you take depends on where you're strongest and what the plant needs when you arrive, and we'll work that out with you.

Commission a new fermentor. Take a vessel from bare hardware to its first real fermentation. Write drivers for instruments nobody has written a driver for, characterise the vessel’s thermal behaviour from step-response data, tune the controllers against your own model, then bring it online for a production run. You’ll touch the whole stack — serial protocols, control theory, our runtime, the HMI — and at the end there’s a fermentation running on your work.

Extend the program runtime. Our DSL is how a fermentation gets described: setpoints, phases, ramps, interlocks, the logic that decides what happens when. You’d work on the compiler and the runtime that executes it — language design, diagnostics that a biologist can actually act on, and an execution model that has to stay correct while real actuators hang off the other end.

Take the runtime distributed, on bare metal. Today BrewControl runs on a host machine reaching out to hardware over serial and Modbus. We want the same program runtime executing on the nodes themselves: ESP32s running Embassy, each owning its slice of the plant, all executing the same programs our host does. That means the runtime working in a fraction of the memory, under hard real-time deadlines.

Alongside that, you’ll get your hands on everything else: chasing a misbehaving sensor down to the wire, debugging a protocol by sniffing the bus, being the person who figures out why the scale reads wrong.

The bar: your project ends when a real fermentation runs on it. Not a demo, not a merged PR — a live culture whose temperature your code is holding.

Who you are

• Rust. You don’t need production Rust, but you’ve written more than a tutorial’s worth and you know why the borrow checker is saying no.

• You think about failure. A fermentation runs for days, unattended, overnight. Code that works when everything else does isn’t interesting to us.

• Builder mentality. You’ve built things outside coursework. Side projects, firmware, open source, something that runs. Show us, don’t describe.

• Debugging stamina. Real hardware lies. Sensors drift, buses drop frames, protocols are undocumented. The fun is in finding out why.

• Fast learner. Excited to dive into fermentation biology and industrial automation, domains few software engineers ever touch.

• Mission driven. Rewriting how the world makes protein genuinely excites you.

Bonus points for: control theory (PID and beyond), embedded or firmware work, industrial protocols (Modbus, OPC UA), language and compiler implementation, electronics or lab hardware, a biology or physics background, previous startup experience.

How we work

Small, highly technical, deeply ambitious. Every person here matters.

We build our pilot plant in our Amsterdam headquarters. You can walk down to the system, test it, change it, test again. We build from first principles. If “industry standard” slows us down, we rewrite it. If you’re looking for a standard 9-to-5 internship, this is not it — your learning curve is as steep as you can handle.

Expected outcomes

• Code running in production against live fermentations, used daily by our fermentation team

• Deep Rust: async, systems design, and correctness where it has consequences

• Real control engineering — modelling a physical system and tuning against your own measurements

• Infrastructure that doesn’t exist anywhere else

Rewards

• A flat, fast, and curious team working on one of the most exciting challenges in food

• An international, high-talent, low-ego culture where ideas matter more than titles

• Room to grow into whatever version of the role you make yours

• Daily plant-based lunch, snacks, fruits, drinks

• In house gym & regular team sport activities

• Fun off sites & team drinks 

What we’re building

We’re going beyond the limiting constraints of photosynthesis. We use natural fermentation to turn simple ingredients into complex proteins. It’s what we've been doing for millennia with wine, beer, bread and yoghurt.

Yet most fermentations rely on sugars - which are derived from crops grown on agricultural land. Our fermentation platform relies on an easily storable and shippable renewable energy based feedstock. This allows us to break free from the limiting constraints of photosynthesis.

We’re building the spiritual successor to the Haber-Bosch process. While Haber-Bosch led to cheap synthetic fertilizer which currently feeds half of humanity, we have found a way to produce amino acid complete proteins up to ±5000X more land efficient than animals. By rough approximation this could multiply the carrying capacity of the earth by an order of magnitude. The result of our ambition should be visible from space.

About us

We’re a small, highly technical and deeply curious team with deep food and fermentation expertise with backgrounds from the Vegetarian Butcher, Perfect Day to Nature’s Fynd and many more.

We’re flat and interdisciplinary by design. We value autonomy, speed, and ambition. You’ll have the freedom to build, and the responsibility to do it well.

We’re based within the city ring of Amsterdam – for a reason. We want to attract the best people from around the world and believe that Amsterdam is a great place to settle – and bike to work. On top of that, the Netherlands is one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world. The Dutch have a mindset to push the boundaries of food production and have the practical expertise to scale up our fermentation platform.

We believe hardware startups can thrive in Europe. If we can get approval here, we can do it anywhere (and we want Europe to accelerate).

We’ve raised +€10M from world-class investors including World Fund, Vorwerk Ventures, Revent, and Nucleus Capital, and European and national grants.