Research Scientist
About IPinfo
IPinfo is a leading provider of IP address data: geolocation, VPN and residential proxy detection, mobile carrier, IP to company, and more than 20 other context tags. Our API handles over 1 billion requests a day, and companies such as Cloudflare, T-Mobile, and SpaceX build our data into their products. We're a fast-growing, bootstrapped company with a fully remote team of more than 80 people. We sponsor academic conferences such as ACM IMC, ACM CoNEXT and TMA, and we collaborate with academic researchers at CAIDA, RIPE NCC, M-Lab, the Internet Society, IIJ, Georgia Tech, and other institutions.
The internship
Our measurement platform, ProbeNet, collects more than 50TB of ping, traceroute, BGP and DNS data every week from over 1,300 servers around the world. As a summer research intern, you'll be a full member of our research team and own one well-scoped research project on that data. We scope each project so it can lead to a publication at a venue such as IMC, PAM or TMA if the results show promise.
Example project areas:
• Geolocating hard prefixes. Some prefixes don't answer probes, sit behind anycast, or publish geofeeds that are wrong.
• Claimed vs. measured location. Find the VPN exit nodes whose advertised location is physically impossible given measured latency.
• Topology from imperfect traceroutes. Map anycast deployments, router-level topology or submarine cable paths from incomplete, asymmetric paths.
• IPv6 at scale. Build target lists and inference methods for an address space that can't be scanned exhaustively.
We'll agree on your exact project with you before the internship starts, based on your research interests. Check out https://ipinfo.io/research for examples of our work.
What you'll do
• Drive your project end to end: design the measurements, run them on ProbeNet and public platforms such as RIPE Atlas, analyze the results, and validate them against ground truth.
• Work with our data in BigQuery at full scale, not on a sample.
• Measure every claim you make about our data in IP addresses against ground truth, not with anecdotes.
• Present your results to the research team and the company, and work on a paper submission with the research team after the internship.
• Ensure that your measurement method works reliably and put it into our production pipelines.
Requirements
• Currently enrolled in a PhD program in computer science or a closely related field, with research in Internet measurement, networking or network security. We don't consider applications from Bachelor's or Master's students.
• Hands-on experience with Internet measurement data. You've run measurements yourself (scans, traceroutes, RIPE Atlas, DNS), or analyzed large datasets such as BGP tables, traceroutes or DNS data in your research.
• Solid knowledge of Internet fundamentals: BGP, IP addressing, IPv6, DNS, anycast, and the pitfalls of traceroute analysis.
• Strong Python or Go, and SQL.
• Statistical care. You know how to validate a result and spot a measurement artifact.
• Clear written and spoken English.
• Available for at least three months between May and October 2027.
Nice to have
• A publication at ACM IMC, SIGCOMM, CoNEXT, PAM, TMA, NSDI, USENIX Security, NDSS, IEEE S&P or ACM CCS, or in ACM SIGCOMM CCR or IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.
• Prior work on IP geolocation, VPN or proxy detection, anycast, Internet topology, or IPv6.
• Experience with BigQuery or other large-scale data tools.
How we work
We're spread across the globe. The whole company meets on a monthly all-hands call and the research team meets weekly. You'll have a dedicated mentor for your internship who will be available for regular or ad-hoc meetings. Everything else happens asynchronously in Slack, GitHub, and Linear, so you choose the hours when you do your best work. That only works with a high level of autonomy and ownership. You'll set your own direction, and no one will break your work down into tickets for you.
What we offer
• A paid internship of at least three months between May and October 2027.
• A research project with a publication goal, mentored by our research team.
• Access to ProbeNet and our full measurement archive.
• A 100% remote team with flexible working hours.
How to apply
Send your CV and a cover letter of no more than one page. The cover letter should give your available start and end dates and answer these three questions:
• Which measurement or dataset from your PhD research best shows how you work, and what did it teach you?
• Pick one of the example project areas above. What would you try first, and how would you know it worked?
• Why do you think you would be a good fit for this internship?
We won't review applications without a CV and a cover letter that answers all three questions.
Application deadline
Please submit your application by November 30, 2026. Earlier applications are preferred.
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