Production/Infrastructure Engineering Intern - Summer 2020 at Shopify

Infrastructure/Production Engineering at Shopify

Are you looking for an opportunity to work on planet-scale infrastructure? Do you want your work to impact thousands of developers and millions of customers? Do you genuinely enjoy tackling complex problems, and learning through experimentation? Shopify Production Engineering is all this and more.

The Production Engineering team builds and maintains Shopify’s critical infrastructure through software and systems engineering. We make sure Shopify—the world’s fastest growing commerce platform—stays reliable, performant, and scalable for our 1000+ member development team to build on, and our 800,000+ merchants to depend on.

Our team covers the disciplines of site reliability engineering, infrastructure engineering, and developer productivity, all to ensure Shopify’s infrastructure is able to scale massively while staying resilient.

Here are some of the things you could work on as part of the Infrastructure/Production Engineering team:

Build on top of one of the largest Kubernetes deployments in Google Cloud (we are operating a fleet of over 50+ clusters)
Collaborate with other Shopify developers to understand their needs and ensure our team works on the right things
Build tooling that delights Shopify developers and allows them to make an impact quickly
Maintain Shopify’s Heroku-style self-service PaaS for our developers to consolidate over 400 production services
Help build our own Database as a Service layers, which include features as transparent load balancing proxies and automatic failovers, using the current best-of-breed technologies in the area.
Help run our caching infrastructure and advise Shopify developers on effective use of the caching layers
Make scale simpler to understand by building the service mesh layer in between Shopify’s infrastructure and the application level
Create our next-generation continuous-integration and continuous-delivery systems
Work as part of the engineering team to build and scale distributed, multi-region systems
Investigate and resolve production issues
Build and support infrastructure and tooling to protect our platform from bots and DDoS attacks
And plenty more!

You’ll need to have:

Awesome programming skills. We usually work with Ruby and Go, but any languages work
Interest working anywhere in the stack, from right beside the OS and up
An interest in infrastructure as code, and infrastructure automation
An excitement for automation and simplicity

It would be great if you had:

Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCE, Azure, Kubernetes, Docker)
Exposure to automating development processes such as continuous integration and continuous delivery
Previous internship experience in a backend developer role

Check out our Open Source contributions:

Tools of our trade: Ruby, Rails, Go, Kubernetes, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, Docker, CI Pipelines, Distributed Systems, Google Cloud

Is some of this tech new to you? That’s OK! We know not everyone will come in fully familiar with this stack, and we provide lots of support to learn on the job.

Life at Shopify

Interns at Shopify are fully integrated with their teams and the things you will work on are thoughtfully considered. If your team is working through a tough problem, so are you. If they are travelling to another city, you’ll be joining. There won’t be any latte fetching, there are no “intern projects” and you’ll have access to a wide range of perks based on your individual interests.

Mentorship will be available to you and you’ll join +4000 exceptionally bright people who are serious about personal growth and learning. We build products that support all kinds of entrepreneurs – from the one-product independent business owner to rapidly scaling brands like Kylie Cosmetics. We’re also the platform for those that haven’t taken the first step toward getting started yet, and we try to level the playing field for anyone with a great idea to start and grow their business.

High trust and flexibility have always been a part of our culture, and if you’re expecting to be told exactly what to do, Shopify may not be the place for you. We don’t claim to have all the answers, and that’s why we look for independent thinkers, collaborators, and people hungry to grow alongside their team. Find out more about our past interns experiences and learn more about how we approach mentorship at Shopify

Shopify internships are 4 and 8 month paid terms, and are open to students, co-ops, recent graduates and those early on in their development careers. The 4-month Summer Internship will run May 4th – August 28th 2020, and the 8-month Summer/Fall Internship will run May 4th – December 18th 2020.

The posting will close Monday January 20th, 2020 at 9:00 AM EST and applications will not be accepted after this date. Applications will be reviewed and interviews will be conducted on a rolling basis starting January 22nd, 2020.

In Your Application

1. Include your resume.

2. We’re always looking to see where passion and engagement shows itself in all aspects of your life. Please answer the 2 questions outlined in the application to tell us why you want to join Shopify and work in Production Engineering/Infrastructure.

If you have projects or work you want to share, include your GitHub link below!

Experience comes in many forms, many skills are transferable, and passion goes a long way. If your experience is close to what we’re looking for, consider applying. We know that diversity of thought makes for the best problem-solving and creative thinking, which is why we’re dedicated to adding new perspectives to the team and encourage everyone to apply.

The Hiring Process

1. Candidates that move beyond the initial application stage will be invited to a “Life Story” interview with a Recruiter on the Intern Program team. The intention of the Life Story interview is to construct your own personal timeline, including decisions you’ve made, what you’re passionate about, and the path you’ve taken to bring you to where you are today.

2. After the Life Story, successful candidates will be invited to a 60 minute technical interview with 2 Shopify developers. You will be informed in advance of the interview of what you need to bring. Generally, we ask that candidates bring a project with them they can present to our interviewers, and specifically something that includes code they have written personally (ideally not a group project). In the event that candidates don’t have a project, then we ask that they complete a coding challenge before the technical interview. The second half of the interview is a collaborative problem solving exercise with our developers.

3. After the technical interview, successful candidates are placed on teams based on their interests, skills and experience. Each placement is done individually and with significant consideration.

*Timelines of decision will be clearly communicated to candidates by their Recruiter throughout the process and you will always hear back from us #noghosting.

**If you are in the University of Waterloo co-op program you must apply through Waterloo Works. If you do not apply through Waterloo Works, it is your responsibility to contact your co-op rep to have this posting added to your profile.

At Shopify, we are committed to building and fostering an environment where our employees feel included, valued, and heard. Our belief is that a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion enables us to truly make commerce better for everyone. We strongly encourage applications from Indigenous peoples, racialized people, people with disabilities, people from gender and sexually diverse communities and/or people with intersectional identities.