My internship experience at Snap
Disclaimer: the following piece contains only my own observations and thoughts based on my personal experience at Snap.
This Winter, I decided to take the semester off from school to do an internship with Snap Inc. Having just been stuck at home for nearly two years due to the pandemic, I had been itching to take a gap semester and travel. So, that’s exactly what I did when I moved my internship offer with Snap to Winter.
And just like that, the first week of January, I packed up my bags and moved across the country to sunny Los Angeles!
Pre-Internship
Going into the internship, I had a very clear idea of what kind of work I wanted to work on while at Snap. As someone interested in product as well as traditional software engineering, I asked to be placed on a backend product team that was close to the consumer on core platform (the Snapchat app).
In order to prepare to move across the country for a few months, I also had to find housing. Thankfully, I had connected with a previous Snap intern who went to my college and was actually the owner of Snap intern/new grad Discord server. He added me to that server and I was able to find two other incoming Winter 2022 interns to live with in LA! We were able to find a great Airbnb relatively close to the office together and it felt great knowing some people going into it as well.
The Work
The Snap team did a great job with team matching and I got exactly what I asked for! I was placed on the Creative Tools-Backend team. This is the team responsible for the backend code behind the tools used to edit a Snap after you take it (ie. captions, stickers, filters, etc!). This was really exciting for me as someone who used to be an avid Snapchat user. It was a highly visible product within the Snapchat app and something that I knew had extremely wide public reach.
In the beginning of the internship, I started with some small tasks which were both productive to the team and my ramping up on the codebase. I felt that they really got me familiarized with the code and comfortable with the workflow of developing on this team.
After my onboarding tickets, I moved on to design a solution for general problem. Essentially, the open question was around how to make creative tools ranking services (the system which ranks everything in creative tools for Snapchat users from stickers, music, filters, etc.) more observable. Through talking to a few engineers and product managers on the team, I quickly learned the information that they needed to more easily see in our ranking pipelines. With a design discussion and general approval from my team, I was able to get started implementing my designed discussion!
The rest of the summer went really smoothly. I didn’t run into any big roadblocks and was able to finish my project a few week before my internship ended. During the process, I felt like I got a good sense of what it was like to work there, think about the product, and practice good general software engineering principles. Through my project, I got to work with Golang, gRPCs, and Protocol Buffers.
Social and Work-Life Balance
Snapchat is has the most casual working environment I have ever experienced. I think the office embodies that quite well: bright yellow walls, bookcases adorned with dancing hotdog plushies at every corner, and bitmoji murals.
Since I interned off-season, there were only about 12 interns in Santa Monica during the time I was there. However, we all got to know each other pretty well by the end of it. I found that the interns, as well as the full-timers, at Snap were generally pretty social people who were a lot of fun to get to know. Generally, the environment was super casual, friendly, and encouraging.
During the 16 weeks I worked there, there were also a few larger social events: Disneyland trip on a random Wednesday and Snappy Hours (where we got to meet Evan Spiegel in a casual setting! These were really nice since I had only ever done remote internships before working here. Even though my work was largely remote, it was still really nice to have these in-person events to look forward to.
Conclusion
I loved my experience at Snap Inc. From the free food to the company culture to the people I worked with and other interns, I really enjoyed it all. Overall, it was a super chill place to work and I’m glad I took a semester off from school for this experience. I also learned a lot about engineering and what it was like to work on a backend and product team. :)
