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Guide to Internships at Tesla Motors

Company Description

Tesla Motors, Inc. is arguably one of the most innovative companies in the world right now. What started out as just an idea, Elon Musk has quickly pushed Tesla from the prototype of the Roadster to the Model S, Model X, and soon Model 3. But Tesla is so much more than just electric vehicles, Tesla is about making the world adopt alternative energy more quickly.

General Information

  • Industry: Automotive, Energy Storage
  • Founded: 2003
  • Type: Publicly Traded
  • Headquarters: 3500 Deer Creek Road. Palo Alto, CA 94304 United States
  • Company Size: 30000+ Employees
  • Average Employee Age:
  • Tech Stack: C++, AngularJS, Python, Javascript, MySQL, MonogDB

How to get an interview?

Internship Overview

  • Application Opening: January
  • Internship Locations: Palo Alto CA, Fremont CA
  • Internship Length: 10 weeks
  • Housing Stipend:
  • Intern Class Size:

Interview Process

  1. Phone interview (anywhere from 1 - 3)
  2. Rarely onsite interview unless local to area

Previous Intern Experiences

Mechanical Design Intern

  • Conceptualize, designed, and analyzed cast knuckle to meet weight, stiffness, castability, and packaging targets
  • Simulated drive unit vibrations to characterize isolation effects for noise, vibration and harshness study
  • Designed rig to test and analyze various drive unit and body-in-white assembly marriage procedures
  • Conduct plasma treatment R&D on experimental and production battery modules
  • Design and integrated production and R&D robots using Yamaha and Rockwell systems
  • Rapidly designed and constructed an optical quality station utilizing Keyence digital microscopes
  • Integrate and validate numerous automated productions systems on tight deadlines
  • Design mechanical, electrical, and software systems for production robots

Propulsion Systems Intern

  • Redesign production parts in motor rotors to solve reliability issues
  • Coordinate with vendors to create new tooling and validate design changes
  • Developed a laser sensor mount and containment shield to safely measure expansion of rotors during high speed spin test

Firmware Intern

  • Designed and refined battery models for predictive analytics concerning charging time.
  • Bug fixing false alerts on Model X and Model S on the main codebase.
  • Create a string template used to generate finite state machine graphs from state machine compiler formatted files.
  • Implemented a driver for a rotary quadrature encoder.

Software Intern

  • Authentication API for Tesla customers in Python, MongoDB.
  • Internal E Commerce System in Angular.js, javascript and MySQL database.

Compensation Table

Role Reported Compensation
Engineering Intern $22
Firmware Engineer Intern $24
Manufacturing Engineer Intern $26
Mechanical Engineer Intern $24