Atlan Internships: The Why, What and Who Answered

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

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“Intern, who?” This is the answer, or a question, from Atlan interns if anybody refers to them as “interns”. And, why not? None of our interns work as “interns” at Atlan, so why should they get addressed as one?

Too often, companies give interns the work that full-time employees refuse to do, or need some form of assistance with. Interns are given responsibilities with insignificant, little or no contribution to the company’s actual work. But every decision at Atlan is made by 20 and 30-somethings who are excited about building amazing things and solving tough problems. If somebody walks into our office today and tries to spot the interns, it is highly likely that they won’t be able to do so. Our interns work alongside the team on independent projects, take ownership of their work, make decisions and drive projects just like any regular employee at Atlan.

How often do we find interns interning with the same organization more than once? Almost never, right? Because students like to maximize their learning by gaining new experiences and doing different internships. But at Atlan, we make sure that we provide ample opportunities to help our interns grow and learn new things. This is the reason that most of our interns end up extending their internships, doing consecutive internships with us, working part-time, and then joining in full-time roles after their graduation.

The longest streak someone has done is 3 internships — we call people who come back multiple times Super Interns! As Divyansh, our former Super Intern and now a full-time member of our team, says,

If you join here in your first year, you are spoilt for life.

Divyansh Saini, Data Success Manager

Why do we care about building this kind of internship experience? One of our core values at Atlan is “One Team”. This means that each of our team members — irrespective of their background, experience, gender, age or race — is treated with equal respect. We have always believed in building a meritocracy and have seen that people create incredible growth paths just by taking up new responsibilities.

Our internship cycles run in two phases—summer and winter. In addition to this, we’re always looking for awesome interns to work with our Engineering and Data Science teams. And hence, our 6-month internship is open throughout the year.

If working at the intersection of data and technology excites you and you think Atlan can be the right place for you, keep reading for more information.

Why should you intern with Atlan?

Our interns work with us, not for us

We have always believed that 19-year-olds and 20-somethings can change the world, so we give our interns lots of responsibility. They are expected to solve problems that we have never solved before, and they get evaluated on the same metrics as anybody in a full-time role.

Our interns work alongside our teams on our latest projects — they build features that go live, speak directly to our customers and clients, create and run live marketing and sales campaigns, and more. No matter what team they end up on, our interns all end up doing amazing work. Here are some examples:

• Sidharth interned as a growth marketing intern with Atlan. He started with designing ad campaigns across platforms, understanding data to drive campaign metrics, and running our first company-wide hill hack competition for an entire quarter. He today drives growth and marketing for our Talent team.
• Krishna was an intern in our first summer internship batch in 2014. He picked up data visualization as his area of expertise and worked with us in an almost full-time capacity through his final year of university — building and launching his first product (a DIY tool for maps, Viz) while still in college. He joined full-time in 2015 and started working on building our data visualization capabilities. At one point, his work was being used by hundreds of leaders including Prime Minister Modi.
• Tanay joined us as an intern after his graduation. As a key engineer on our Android team, he scaled the product to 100,000+ users. In early 2018, he stepped up into a leadership role and today leads one of our product teams.
• Divyansh worked on our early sales and marketing campaigns during his 2 internships. Now, as a full-time member of our team, he has picked up the challenge of working with one of our cofounders and taking a new product to market. Just 3 months after graduating, he’s spoken to dozens of potential customers, started a newsletter, hosted AMA sessions with serial entrepreneurs and given talks to college students about entrepreneurship.
• Ankita joined as an intern after graduating in 2017. She played a crucial role in our work around data analysis and visualization. From research and analysis, today she has grown as a data success manager with Atlan. She is today getting the humans of data around the world onboard on Atlan and helping data teams do their lives’ best work with Atlan.

These examples aren’t anomalies. One out of every four interns has joined full or part-time after their graduation, and one-third of our current employees are ex-interns. Some of our earliest interns have even taken up key leadership roles and evolved to become the pillars of the company.

Fail fast and learn

As a startup, our team gets exposed to lots of opportunities and problems. We might not always know the answer, but it’s important that we keep growing and experimenting. We expect the same thing from our interns!

We look out for people who are passionate about learning, doing new things and have a steep learning curve. We have always hired exceptional interns who we know can do some great work — and to help them do that, we make sure we provide them with the right mentorship, guidance, resources, and support.

A lot of our interns have surprised us by delivering more than what we expected from them and demonstrating our values like “Giving 120%” and “Never Be Satisfied”. They took responsibilities beyond their role, picked up problems that they wanted to solve and figured out ways to contribute through their work in the best possible way.

For example, Rohan joined us as a Front-End Intern and soon realized that one of our internal products wasn’t updating its users regularly. He decided to take up the self-appointed product evangelist role and started writing release notes himself — which soon went on to become team-wide practice.

In Rohan’s words,

You get things done every day, grow every week, become the better version of yourself, and nothing else matters.

Rohan Goel, Front-End Intern

And Rohan has a challenge for you!

I challenge you to find a better place to work than @AtlanHQ pic.twitter.com/5caQ9sNQP2

— Rohan Goel (@goelrohan6) July 20, 2019

Who can intern with Atlan?

The short answer is “You can.” Identify the role you want to intern for, show us everything that makes you the best fit for the role, brag all you want to about your work and skills in your application form, and we will have you onboard! But first, here are the things to consider before you hit that APPLY button:

Have you picked up the basic skills you’re going to need?

Once you have made up your mind that you want to intern with us, it’s time that you test yourself. As soon as you join us as an intern, you will be given a lot of challenges — including in your application! So it’s important that you are prepared to nail the technical round of your application process. Here’s what you can do to get prepared:

• If you are an engineer, learn the latest frameworks and languages, use open-source projects, and build something — a web app, a native app, etc.
• If you are a data science enthusiast, learn R or Python for data science, work on Kaggle projects, or create your own models/analytical reports using open data. There is a sea of it!

Do you have 2-6 months?

Joining for less than 2 months won’t help you learn as much as possible. Carve out at least 2-6 months for an internship so you can make the most of this experience — figure out our systems, learn from the people around you, and leave your mark! If you can’t join for 3 months, reach out and we will try to see if we can figure out something for you.

Are you up for the challenges that are going to be thrown your way?

To make the most out of interning at Atlan, you have to join us with a mindset to take on new challenges. When you walk in on day one, your hack week will be designed to push you out of your comfort zone. While you will be thrown with daily challenges from your team members, sometimes it might be that random cafeteria conversation with someone from another team followed by a side hack project that might end up being what you learn most from.

The more you give in your internship with us and the more opportunities you take up, the more you’ll end up learning and growing. Because as Aditya said,

All this happens because you know that everything you do is not just your work. Because you can feel that it is something much bigger than you or any other individual.

Aditya Lahiri, Data Science Intern

Read Aditya’s blog about what our culture actually feels like.

Before you hit the submit button on that application — make sure you’re ready to give your 120% to your internship!

What will you work on?

By now, you must have gotten a glimpse of what it is like to intern here. Now let’s talk about the things that you will be working on if you join us as an intern now — the tech stack, the projects, the campaigns and all the things that will make this an internship to remember.

We are at a very interesting phase at Atlan. On the one hand, some of our products have scaled tremendously and we’re charting out our plans to help data teams worldwide. On the other hand, some of our newer products are finding product-market fit — the exhilarating phase of finding the “Aha!” moment for our users. Our learnings from scaling our first product and our teams have made our team members great mentors. In a nutshell, an internship at Atlan today will be the best of all worlds — big problems to solve, big opportunities for go-getters with little past experience to prove their mettle, and some wise mentorship rooted in experience.

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If, at the end of this blog, you are convinced to write your next internship story with Atlan (of course, you’ll be writing a blog!), get going and apply soon. We process applications on a rolling basis, and so the earlier you apply, the better the chances you’ll get selected. Check out all our internships and apply here!

If you’re not sure about what role to apply to or think that you’d be a fit for multiple roles, go ahead and apply for the roles that you think you’d be a fit for, then mention in your application what you’re really hoping to achieve in the internship. We’ll work with you to figure out the right internship during the application process.

Looking for more information? Learn more about our internship application process.