Lam Research Internships 2027: Programs, Pay and How to Apply

Lam Research recruits interns across eight technical fields for its semiconductor equipment business through its University Programs, with internships and co-op placements built for undergraduate and graduate students. It's not a household name the way a consumer tech company is, but it's one of the largest suppliers of the machines that actually build computer chips.

Majors Lam Research recruits interns from

As of this guide's last update, ApplyBolt's live board shows real openings at Lam Research, though a 2027-specific internship posting wasn't up yet. Lam's own careers site points students to its university programs portal and a recruiting events calendar rather than one fixed application window, so check both the roles below and Lam's site directly as the school year progresses.

What Lam Research actually does

Lam Research designs and manufactures wafer fabrication equipment, the machines chipmakers use for deposition, etch and cleaning steps in semiconductor manufacturing. Its tools show up deep inside the process of turning a raw silicon wafer into a working chip, and the company counts major global chipmakers among its customers. If you've never heard of Lam before, that's normal. It sells to other companies, not consumers, which keeps it out of the public eye despite its size.

For interns, that means the work sits close to real manufacturing engineering rather than a typical consumer software stack, even in the software track, since a lot of Lam's software runs inside physical equipment rather than on a phone or in a browser.

Pay and what to expect

Lam Research hasn't published a standard intern pay scale on its university programs page. The company describes offering competitive compensation, comprehensive healthcare and flexible work arrangements, including on-site and remote options for some roles, along with mentorship from experienced engineers during the internship itself. Most internships run around 12 weeks in the summer, with some co-op placements running longer depending on the school's schedule.

Lam also runs affinity groups and dedicated safe spaces for dialogue as part of the intern experience, on top of the standard project work and mentorship. Combined with its university partnerships, that suggests a program that puts real effort into onboarding students from a range of backgrounds rather than treating the internship as a purely technical placement with no community built around it.

Why a semiconductor equipment internship is different

Working at a company like Lam Research isn't the same as interning at a company whose product you use directly. The output of your work, if you're on the hardware or process side, is a piece of capital equipment that costs a customer's fab millions of dollars and runs around the clock for years. That changes the bar for reliability and precision compared to a typical consumer software internship, and it's worth going in with that expectation rather than assuming it's interchangeable with any other engineering internship.

How to apply

Lam recruits through its University Programs page and campus recruiting events, and partners with groups including the National GEM Consortium, the National Society of Black Engineers, the Society of Women Engineers, the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers and the United Negro College Fund on outreach. If your school has a chapter of any of these, that's a real path into a warm introduction rather than a cold application.

Match your resume to the track: process and materials roles want lab or coursework tied to chemistry and materials, mechanical and electrical roles want design or controls project experience, and software roles want systems-level programming rather than app development. If your school runs any of the affinity organizations Lam partners with, use that connection to get a real introduction rather than submitting cold, since it's a faster path to a first conversation than the general application queue. For the broader summer 2027 timeline, see our summer 2027 internships guide. Applied Materials and NetApp are two more hardware-adjacent companies hiring interns right now; see our Applied Materials internships guide and NetApp internships guide.