Once defined by its oil and aviation sectors, Austin has transformed into one of America’s fastest-growing tech hubs. Now, it’s home to more than 5,700 tech companies and one of the highest concentrations of STEM talent in the country. Tech giants, like Apple, Dell and Samsung have moved in over the years, building massive, multi-building campuses that make up the region’s so-called “Silicon Hills,” turning central Texas into a magnet for early-career tech professionals.
Top Companies Hiring Interns in Austin
- Tesla
- Dell Technologies
- Apple
- Samsung
- IBM
That scale translates into unusually hands-on (often paid) work opportunities, offering internships and co-op programs in everything from semiconductor fabrication and automotive engineering to AI systems and cloud architecture that are embedded directly within production and research teams. Here are some of the top companies onboarding the next wave of fresh talent in Austin.
Top Companies Hiring Interns in Austin
Headquarters: Santa Clara, California
Founded: 1969
Company size: 30k+ employees
Austin is home to AMD’s largest campus in the United States. The 59-acre site is the heart of the chipmaker’s design and research operations, where engineers develop CPUs, GPUs and high-performance computing architectures used across data centers and consumer devices. It hosts recurring 12-week summer internships and 6-month co-ops, and, through a long-standing partnership with the University of Texas at Austin, AMD maintains a direct pipeline for PhD and undergraduate researchers to transition into full-time roles within its local semiconductor engineering teams.
Headquarters: Cupertino, California
Founded: 1976
Company size: 80k+ employees
Apple’s $1 billion, 133-acre North Austin campus is its largest engineering and operations hub outside of its California headquarters, employing thousands of local residents. According to the company, candidates that win one of their prestigious summer or year-round paid internships are “treated as full contributors” to their respective teams, whether that’s in silicon development, finance, hardware or software engineering, global supply chain management or on another track.
Headquarters: Armonk, New York
Founded: 1911
Company size: 300k+ employees
IBM has maintained a massive research and development presence since it first arrived in Austin over 50 years ago. Its paid internships — which last 8 to 12 weeks — focus on cutting-edge fields like quantum computing, Watson AI and enterprise design through its Extreme Blue program. They also offer year-round co-ops that span up to 16 months, allowing local students to gain professional experience while completing their degrees at nearby universities.
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Founded: 2003
Company size: 100k+ employees
Tesla recently moved its global headquarters to its Gigafactory in Austin, which acts as the primary hub for Cybertruck and Model Y production. Its local internship program is exceptionally hands-on, offering participants the chance to work directly on manufacturing engineering, autopilot AI and large-scale operations on site. According to the company, early career candidates are prioritized for full-time roles.
Headquarters: Round Rock, Texas
Founded: 1984
Company size: 100k+ employees
As a cornerstone of the Austin tech scene, Dell’s 1.2 million square-foot campus in nearby Round Rock hosts a wide variety of internship programs for roles in supply chain, finance and hardware engineering that can last anywhere from six to 24 weeks. The company is famous for its intern-to-full-time pipeline, often extending offers to students well before graduation.
Headquarters: Suwon-si, South Korea
Founded: 1938
Company size: 260k+ employees
Samsung is a titan of the “Silicon Hills,” operating one of the most advanced semiconductor fabrication plants in the world right in the city. Its paid internship program is deeply technical, offering students in chemical, electrical and mechanical engineering the chance to work inside high-tech, multi-billion dollar “fabs.” Typically, Samsung starts posting open roles in January that span marketing, strategy, product management, software development, networks and engineering each year.
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Founded: 1977
Company size: 160k+ employees
Oracle officially moved its world headquarters to a 40-acre waterfront campus in South Austin in 2018, which currently serves as the operational base for thousands of employees. This facility hosts the Class Of program, a high-volume recruiting funnel that hires hundreds of annual graduates for technical sales and cloud infrastructure consulting tracks. Over the 12-week training course, interns and entry-level hires are converted into full-time account executives and solution engineers for the Oracle Cloud unit.
Headquarters: Eindhoven, Netherlands
Founded: 2006
Company size: 30k+ employees
NXP operates multiple manufacturing facilities and R&D centers across the city. The company offers internship programs that focus on the automotive and internet-of-things sectors, where students gain experience in embedded systems and chip testing. Globally, NXP Semiconductors fills more than half of its entry-level engineering roles — about 1,000 positions each year — through its intern and co-op programs.
Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Founded: 1976
Company size: 5k - 10k employees
National Instruments, or simply NI, operates from a 72-acre campus along North MoPac Boulevard. It runs a paid summer internship program that rotates early-career hires through roles in R&D, engineering, technical support and sales. After Emerson’s acquisition of NI, the combined companies also committed $8.5 million to help fund the University of Texas’ semiconductor science and engineering master’s program, broadening professional opportunities in advanced hardware and chip design for Austin locals.
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington
Founded: 1994
Company size: 1.5m+ employees
Amazon has a 145,000 square-foot office space at The Domain in North Austin. At this site, thousands of its employees work across Amazon Web Services, Alexa and Amazon Advertising, while its engineering teams build out AWS hardware and infrastructure, such as Graviton processors and the networking systems powering its global data centers. Early-career roles there include 12-week summer software engineering internships and year-round solutions architect residencies focused on cloud migration and machine learning.
