Want to Land an Internship at Atlan? Here’s What It Takes.

Note: This blog was last updated in August 2019 with the latest information about our internship hiring process.

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At Atlan, we hire interns for core functions like building apps, business development, and marketing. We believe even 18 year olds can work alongside us like regular team members. Many of our interns have extended their internships, completed multiple internships, or joined us full time after they graduated. (In fact, one-third of our current employees are former interns!)

We’ve created this blog to show what our application process looks like for interns. Each person’s application process varies based on their location, background and the role they’re applying for. For example, we may ask people in Delhi to come into our office for an interview or challenge, but people outside of Delhi won’t have to travel for this. You can expect all or some of these steps to happen for each person who applies, though the order may vary depending on what’s right for each application.

Send in your application

No matter who you are or what internship you’re applying for, you’ll always have to start by filling out an application.

What to do

• We don’t process resumes sent in via email, no matter how awesome they are. Please always apply through our Careers portal. That’s the only way your application will get accepted!
• Resumes submitted without answers to our application questions will usually get rejected. We’ve handpicked questions for each position, and we evaluate your application based on your answers to these questions. So we think they’re pretty important!
• We care about the details. If you have a shabby looking resume, we don’t interview you. We believe that the folks who will be successful at Atlan are the ones who work to perfect the smallest details.
• If possible, show us what you can do instead of just writing about your skills. Want to be an Android intern? Send us APKs or, even better, a Google Play Store link to your app. Sales intern? Send us a pitch!
• Research the role and tell us exactly why you want to work with us. Generic answers about wanting to work with a startup won’t get you very far.

What not to do

• Don’t say you want to work with us because we’re a “prestigious firm”. We’re not looking for people who are only in this for prestige or bragging rights.
• Don’t tell us how you really want to learn data science or this would be a great opportunity for you. Tell us why you uniquely will make a mark on Atlan before you leave.
• Badly formatted emails and wrong spellings in your application set off our alarm bells, especially if you’re applying for a business, growth or content role.

Looking for more information about how to ace our application? Check out our full-time hiring blog for more FAQs and tips.

Are you up for the challenge?

If you nail your application, we’ll set you up for the ultimate challenge! All our interns, based on their portfolio, get a challenge. If you’re applying for engineering, we test you on building something cool. If you’re applying as a data scientist, we test your data crunching skills. This is where we dig a little deeper into your skill set.

We generally allow 3-8 days for you to send back your challenge. If something comes up during this time and you won’t be able to complete the challenge, let us know. We evaluate extensions on a case-by-case basis.

Chat with our team

If you’ve gotten this far, this is good news. Give yourself some credit for making it this far, because you’ve already impressed the team!

Next, you receive an invitation for a call with our team. A call is a way for us to get to know you better. It could range anywhere between 15 minutes and 1 hour, and you could be asked a lot of different questions about your passion, your experiences, and your dreams. Sometimes you’ll even be asked to solve puzzles or challenges on the spot.

This call is where we understand if your goals align with ours, answer your questions around Atlan, and see if we share the same passion to do incredible work. It’s also the best way for us to learn more about you as a person — how you like to work, how well you will fit with the team, and what your perfect role will look like — so please just be honest!

P.S. We often will do more than one call to understand you better. You may end up talking to our hiring team, the team you’ll be working with, or even our co-founders.

Visit our office

It’s important to us that our team loves every new hire and every new hire loves our team. That’s why, in some cases, we invite candidates who stay in Delhi to spend a day or two with us. It’s a great way to meet all of the team members, talk in depth with our co-founders, and learn more about our work.

We also try to ensure that everyone who comes to our office with us gets a real taste of what it’s like to be at Atlan. This includes you solving a challenge, a real-life problem statement being faced by the team, which should help you better understand the types of problems we solve every day.

You’ve got mail

If your application went well… woohoo, you’ll get a mail accepting you into our internship program!

A couple of FAQs

How do I know if I’ll fit with the Atlan team? What is the Atlan office like?

This blog is the best place to learn more about our work, teams and culture! Here are some of our favorite team blogs about life at Atlan:

• Going from Great People to Greater Teams: How We Think About Growth at Atlan
• How We Live Our Cultural Values Every Day
• How We Support Our People from Day One
• Our 10 Engineering Commandments
• Engineering Demos: How We Share our Knowledge and Build a Better Engineering Culture

Will I get feedback on my challenge or interview?

If you interview with us and we don’t end up giving you an offer, we’ll give you feedback on why. Hopefully it’ll help you understand what didn’t quite work out and help you with future internship applications.

However, we unfortunately can’t give feedback on every challenge right now. We really value feedback, and being straightforward is even one of our core company values, so we’d love to integrate this value into our hiring process. But we haven’t yet figured out a scalable way to do that.

To give a bit of context, our team reviewed nearly 8,000 applications last year. Even if we spend just 5 minutes per person, that’s 16 work weeks spent on feedback. As a small team, we unfortunately don’t have that time right now. But please know that we’re experimenting to figure out a way to give feedback scalably.

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Any more questions or concerns? Check out our Careers site, or contact us at [email protected].

Interested in working with us full time? We’ve talked about our process for full time positions in a separate post here.