Trail of Bits

All interviews run over Google Meet, and the firm states a hiring decision within five business days of the last interview. The four-stage structure, three-week timeline, and five-day decision window have held since at least 2022, per the firm's own account of its process.

Because the loop runs about three weeks with a multi-day take-home window in the middle, it typically overlaps with whatever else is active in a candidate's search that week. Trail of Bits reviews applications on a rolling, year-round basis rather than a fixed campus season, so the loop can start whenever an application is submitted rather than waiting on an intake date.

Interns work inside the firm's live research and engineering teams; recently published intern projects span blockchain and smart-contract tooling, binary analysis, and internal automation, and the firm has published intern work every year from at least 2020 through 2025. Both tracks are advertised as open to remote candidates, with an option to work from the firm's Brooklyn, NY office, per its 2026 summer internship posting.

Each track is a single project rather than a multi-team rotation, and the firm opens and closes every cycle's applications separately rather than running one shared campus deadline, so a candidate needs to track the specific posting rather than assume a fixed annual window.

The firm is also the original author of Slither, Echidna, and Manticore, security-analysis tools for smart contracts and binaries still in active use across the blockchain-security field, with Slither's design documented in a peer-reviewed paper on arXiv. For an early-career engineer, both facts point the same way: audit and consulting work here sits directly upstream of public research output and competition-grade tooling, rather than staying internal work product that never leaves a client engagement.