Now accepting applications: Software Engineer – Gap Year →

One year off school. A founder’s education.

Spend a year as a full-time engineer at Netic, a fast-growing AI startup. Build products real businesses use every day, earn a full salary with equity, and live in an apartment we pay for in San Francisco or New York.

Apply now See what the first year looked like

What Davin, our first gap-year engineer, did

Day 1: helped bring on a new customer

Week 2: worked on-site at a customer’s business

Owned software handling millions of dollars a day

Built the system that figures out who’s calling

Helped take Netic into new industries

Came up with, built, and owned the context engine behind our AI

What Netic does

When someone’s AC dies on the hottest day of the year, their roof leaks after a storm, or their dog needs urgent care, they call a local business for help. Netic’s AI answers that call, day or night, figures out what’s needed, and books the appointment.

Then it goes a step further and finds the next job before anyone calls. If a furnace is 14 years old and the weather is turning cold, Netic reaches out to book a tune-up before it breaks.

The stakes are real. When a tornado hit St. Louis, one of our customers got 1,000 calls in 90 minutes. Off-the-shelf AI models aren’t reliable enough for moments like that, so we build our own system of AI agents on top of them.

2024 Founded, and already on Forbes’ 2026 Next Billion-Dollar Startups list

$43M Raised from Founders Fund, Greylock, and Hanabi

~50 people Small enough that everyone owns something important

$540B Spent on home repair and services in the US each year

A summer gets you a project. A year gets you ownership.

Twelve weeks is enough to finish an intern project. It isn’t enough to own something people depend on, earn a customer’s trust, or see how a team handles things going wrong. That takes a year.

Summer internship

Netic Gap Year

Length

10–12 weeks

12 months, full-time

What you work on

A project sized to fit the summer

Products real businesses use every day

Customers

You might meet one

You’re working with them from your first week

Responsibility

Your code might ship

Your code handles real money, and you fix it when it breaks

Who you learn from

Your mentor and intern class

Your mentor, our leadership team, customers, and investors

Pay

Intern pay for a summer

Full salary, equity, and an apartment we pay for

You leave with

A line on your resume

A real sense of how great companies, and real AI products, get built

It started in a house in San Francisco.

After his sophomore year, Davin Jeong took a leave of absence from Harvard to join Netic as its ninth engineer, back when the team worked out of a house in San Francisco. Over the next twelve months he helped take Netic beyond plumbing and heating into new industries, built the system that figures out who’s calling, designed and owned the context engine that lets our AI agents treat every caller personally, and built sales tools that multiplied our customers’ revenue.

He sat in on sales calls and leadership meetings, and watched Netic grow from that house into one of Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups. Now he’s back at Harvard for junior year. The Gap Year Program exists so more students can have that year.

“I knew I wanted to start a company someday, but I didn’t know what excellence actually looked like.”

Davin Jeong, on why he took the year

Davin Jeong Harvard · Netic’s first gap year

Onboarded a customer on his first dayDay 1

Belted out Ed Sheeran on a team beach tripDay 9

Traveled to work on-site with a customerWeek 2

Built a new AI voice agent from the ground upShipped

Pitched and built our context engineOwned end to end

Owned code handling millions of dollars a dayIn production

Met our board members and top investorsIn the room

His idea, his outcome

The context engine

A good receptionist knows who’s calling, what happened on their last visit, and what equipment is in their home. Our AI agents needed that same context to be personal, and nobody had built a way to give it to them.

Davin spotted the gap while working on real customer problems, pitched the idea, and built it. Today the context engine is part of Netic’s core platform, and every one of our agents uses it.

01 Spotted the problem Saw again and again that our agents didn’t know enough about the person on the line.

02 Brought the teams together Worked with our customer teams and our AI and machine learning teams to shape what it needed to do.

03 Built it Designed and wrote the system that hands every agent the right information at the right moment.

04 Owned the outcome Shipped it to production and stayed responsible for how well it worked for customers.

What you’ll actually learn

What real ownership feels like

You’ll own software that hundreds of people use at the same time, handling millions of dollars a day. If it breaks, you fix it. That’s where the learning happens: talking to customers, making decisions, shipping, breaking things, fixing them, and doing it again.

How to solve a genuinely hard problem

Getting an AI to chat is the easy part. Getting it to reliably book a real appointment, send the right technician, and handle the payment, all while plugging into decades-old software, is hard. That’s the job.

What AI can actually do

In real products, the AI model is often the easy part. The hard part is everything around it: giving it the right information, connecting it to other software, testing it, and planning for when it’s wrong. After a year, you’ll know what in AI is real and what’s still a demo.

How a company gets built

Sit in on sales calls and leadership meetings. See how great products get built and sold, how you earn a customer’s trust, and how a strong team handles things going wrong.

What you get

We take care of the rest, so you can spend the year building.

A full salaryYou’re paid as a full-time software engineer, not an intern.

EquityStock in Netic, so you own a piece of what you help build.

Room & board, on usA great apartment a short walk from the office, in the best neighborhoods of San Francisco or New York.

A dedicated mentorAn experienced Netic engineer in your corner all year.

A network for laterGet to know the investors and founders around Netic. When you start your own company, they’re the people who can advise you, back you, or build with you.

A fun, in-person teamWork side by side with engineers from Scale, Databricks, HRT, Meta, MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, and come along on team trips.

Who’s behind Netic

Netic’s founder and CEO, Melisa Tokmak, grew up in a small town in Turkey, studied computer science at Stanford, and ran multiple businesses at Scale AI before starting Netic.

We’re backed by some of the best-known investors and founders in tech.

Founders Fund Greylock Hanabi

Dylan FieldCEO, Figma

Alexandr WangFounder, Scale AI

Elad GilInvestor

Mike VolpiGP, Hanabi Capital

Who should apply

You’re in college, anywhere from freshman to junior year, and can take a year off before going back to finish your degree.

You build things on your own: class projects, hackathons, internships, or side projects you finished.

You want to start a company someday and want to see what great looks like up close first.

You want to own something people actually depend on, even if that means fixing it at 2 a.m.

How it works

Apply for Software Engineer – Gap Year.

Interview with our engineering team.

Accept your offer and take a leave of absence from school.

Move into your apartment in San Francisco or New York and start building. Start dates are flexible, so you can join whenever the timing works for you.

Applications are open.

Apply for Software Engineer – Gap Year. Know a freshman, sophomore, or junior who should spend next year building? Send this their way.

Apply now