Why Penn Labs?
Because we ♥ creators
If you love to build real products to help real people, this is the group for you. All Penn students are eligible to apply for any open position, regardless of their major or year.
Our mission is to build tech products to serve all Penn students, a goal which requires a both commitment and technical experience. Each week, we meet for 4 hours to work on projects, discuss future product roadmaps, and learn more about the technologies we use. Members are also expected to work outside of meetings to meet product goals. While technical ability varies when joining Penn Labs and our members are always learning, our commitment to building quality products means that we seek candidates with sufficient technical ability, which we evaluate through the technical challenge phase of the application process.
Come out to our info sessions to learn more and meet our members! And feel free to reach out to contact@pennlabs.org anytime.
Info Sessions
Learn more about life in Penn Labs
Come meet our members and learn more about what we do!
Monday 9/2/24, 7:00-8:00pm
TOWN 100
Friday 9/6/24, 5:30-6:30pm
JMHH F65
Open Roles
Software Engineering
Build products and implement new features to solve problems with tech. Whether you’re interested in front-end web dev, iOS programming, or data science, there’s a project that you’ll find interesting.
While many of our developers have multiple interests and responsibilities, here are the categories that we find useful to get to know you by:
- Backend Web
- Frontend Web
- DevOps
- Android
- iOS
Check out our stack to find out more about the frameworks and tools we use in our products.
Product Design
Connect function with form to reach users and meet their needs through UI/UX and graphic design. Designers create low to high-fidelity mockups, prototypes, and graphic assets. They also manage the visual language of the organization. Our toolkit includes Sketch, Figma, Zeplin, and Adobe Suite.
Business Development
Our products need to be taken from "lab" to real world. BizDev spearheads marketing, events, and collaborations to ensure that Penn Labs reaches real users and meets their needs. If you want to be in the tech industry and help grow an organization in all capacities (strategy, user acquisition, finance, etc), this is the role for you.
Application Process
If any of that gets you excited, we’d love for you to apply to Penn Labs! After the written application, we invite qualified candidates to our second round. This takes place in two parts:
- Technical challenge where you can show off your skills. You’ll be given a few days to complete a take-home challenge. We hold an office hours event and are always available via email for questions.
- Casual chat with a current member, because we want to get to know you in person! Community and culture are very important to us. This conversation also gives you the chance to learn more about what being in Penn Labs is really like.
More About Us
Iconic Products
From Penn Course Review to the Common Funding Application, we build software that improves the lives of every Penn student. Watching your friends use the products that you helped build is incredibly rewarding way to make an impact at Penn.
Hone Your Skills
Building and maintaining production-quality products used by thousands of students every day is great real-world experience that's hard to get anywhere else on campus. Our members are highly sought-after, becoming teaching assistants, working for prestigious companies around the world, and launching their own startups.
Modern Engineering
We use exclusively open source modern frameworks that are commonly used in the software industry (like React, Django, Swift, and Kotlin). Our engineers keep up to date with good coding/deployment practices and we always place an emphasis on becoming better programmers.
Lots of Fun
We're proud of the community we've built inside Penn Labs. Outside of working on all our products, we're a group of friends who support each other. We have a co-ed rec basketball team (2018-19 champions!), board game nights, study sessions, and also just hang out. It's always great to get away with friends to avoid thinking about bugs for a while.