Announcing the Reddit Internship for Engineers (RIFE)

One of the most enjoyable parts of growing in my career as a software engineer is getting to mentor The Next Generation. There inevitably comes a day in every CTO’s life when you discover the juniorest of juniors you hired “a while ago” (the whiles get shorter as you get older) has not only stopped performing spontaneous (unplanned) production “load tests,” but has become the leader of a new eng team with juniors of their own to mentor. It’s in that spirit that I’m very pleased to announce the first ever fully fledged (and paid!) internship program for software-engineers-in-training, coming to Reddit HQ in summer 2018!

Redditors have been asking us to have internships for years, but we wanted to make sure that when we hire juniors (whether pre- or post-grad), we set them up for success. This means not just giving them a job but also a way to progress in their career. As a company, we know we can provide access to mentorship from world-class engineers with lots of experience in scaling. Implicit in the “access” is that they need to be “accessible.” We are finally big enough and have enough basic infrastructure and good processes to make sure we can build product, mentor juniors, and keep the site up. We also have an increasingly large list of hard but interesting projects to work on, which are also relatively well-defined. This means we have work for engineers of all experience levels, and the work will be interesting and necessary.

In planning this move, we realized that we’d also like to not just hire an intern, but rather a bona fide intern class. This ups the work for us, and the number of people committed to the endeavor, but also means a chance for an honest-to-goodness internship program complete with trust falls (we assume this is a necessary ingredient of mixing “HR” with “bootcamp,” and if we’re wrong, we’ll have a batch of interns to test these ideas out on!).

So with all that to motivate why we’re doing this, let’s move onto the how. If you satisfy the following criteria…

A desire to work at Reddit HQ in San Francisco over Summer 2018

Are actively working towards a degree in CS, EE, or a related field

Are able to program your way out of a paper bag…or make a paper bag out of CSS3…or something probably involving React because that’s all anyone talks about anymore

Ability to fetch coffee… for yourself! From our wide array of Bay Area coffee choices!

Authorization to work in the United States

You’re over the age of 18

Have laughed at at least three out of the five jokes present in this post

…then you should really go here and submit your resume for consideration.

Questions? Witty comments? Join the discussion in r/blog!