This past summer, Wayfair welcomed 47 software engineering interns to its Boston headquarters. Traveling from 27 different universities across the United States, these interns were immersed in a summer internship that would challenge them to be critical thinkers, innovators, and collaborative team members as they partnered up with engineering teams to solve complex business problems.
Outside of their work experience, our interns had the opportunity to grow and learn through different programs hosted by the Campus Recruiting team. From a Red Sox game to a hackathon, even to a panel where directors around the company shared their experience, they were able to develop both personally and professionally. At the end of the summer, we asked each of them to provide some insights on their time at Wayfair, which we share with you today. Enjoy the read!
Farid Waziri
Team: iOS Core
UC Berkeley ‘19
Hi everyone! My name is Farid and i'm a Computer Science major at UC Berkeley. I interned as a software engineer on the iOS Core team, and those ten weeks were absolutely fantastic. I highly recommend everyone apply, even if you live far away from HQ. I live in California, and found exploring a historic city like Boston exciting and invigorating.
During my internship, I had the opportunity to improve my skills tremendously through building a movie app designed to provide practical experience in mobile development. With the help of my mentor, the workshops I attended, and of course all the other kind engineers throughout the business, I learned a lot in just a few weeks. The rest of my internship focused on my intern project, an iMessage Extension that was really fun and provided real-world experience.
Wayfair does an excellent job of allowing interns to experience what it’s like to be a full time employee. The company also excels in providing fun events such as scavenger hunts, attending a baseball game, an end-of-summer party with the whole company, plus much more. I definitely came out of this experience a stronger engineer, with a ton of new friends, and a plethora of awesome memories.
Adam Carlson
Team: Product Details Page
Dartmouth College ‘19
This summer I worked on the Product Details Page team. Throughout the ten week internship, I was treated like a regular engineer every step of the way. Consequently, I had the opportunity to ship code to our millions of users several times each week. For instance, I developed a new, mobile version of our 'Customers Ultimately Bought' feature which is now live on the Wayfair site.
Most excitingly, I quickly discovered that Wayfairians are not afraid to try new ideas and take risks. Each summer, Wayfair hosts a company-wide hackathon, where employees come up with new ideas and pitch them to company leadership. As an intern, I was welcomed into the competition along with hundreds of other people. It was a lot of fun to see what employees created in a single weekend including a new app for Wayfair drivers, a 3D room planner tool, and machine learning for product reviews. I even made it to the finals and showcased my business idea to Wayfair's founders, the CTO, and the CMO!
Kuan-Chi Chen
Team: iOS Verticals
Mt. Holyoke ‘19
At Wayfair, I had a summer full of unique experiences. Working on the iOS Verticals team, I was able to not only make improvements to the codebase but also to deploy my own module in the Wayfair app. I constructed a sectional configurator module with the overall concept of $30M together with another intern on the team. The sectional module allows the user to pick and load a different configuration directly from the Product Detail Page. More importantly, the same code can be reused easily in the future to build further configuration modules.
Before the internship, I expected to learn some new technical skills and how to work as a software engineer in a large company. Indeed, I learned a lot about Swift, Xcode, and Git with the help of the iOS workshops taught by engineers on the team. Since this is assigned as a two-person project, we also built up experience in pair programming and communication, and became more confident in sharing wild ideas along with our solutions. Over the course of the internship, we learned how to be a contributing force in a big company that has a lot of things going on all at once. It is amazing to see how you can make your own contribution in parallel with others. Now, I feel comfortable bringing app ideas to life and contributing modules to popular and widely-used apps.
As for socializing and fun, our amazing Campus Recruiting team held a scavenger hunt in the company workspace and the surrounding Back Bay area, provided free tickets to a Red Sox baseball game, started the first Community Coding Day where we mentored middle school students, in addition to career panels and networking events. The people I worked with coupled with the office environment truly made this internship memorable and rewarding. My team was full of extremely knowledgeable engineers who solve interesting problems every day. Wayfair’s open and collaborative environment encourages fast-growing mindsets and made my ten weeks a very rewarding and memorable experience. Interning at Wayfair has definitely helped me grow as an iOS developer and as a person, and has also given me the confidence to step into the industry after graduation. This was by far the best internship experience I have ever had!
Flavio Andrade
Team: Wayfair Labs
UMass Boston ‘19
This summer, I had the pleasure and amazing opportunity to work for the first time ever as a software engineering intern. My team was Wayfair Labs, which is a two month program for newly minted Labsters to work on two full stack, customer-facing web applications. The Labs program was great because I could collaborate with other Labsters to solve problems, and we had full control over our work. To succeed in Labs, I had many important resources that I took advantage of. These resources included the tech leads and clients who helped me get my environment setup, and provided guidance and support throughout the program. They were also very patient as they helped me learn from my mistakes and offered constructive feedback on code reviews. Through code reviews, I improved my communication skills within the workplace by setting up one-on-one meetings to ensure I fully understood the feedback I was receiving. Another resource I took advantage of was the ability to do code searches, and read examples of work completed by other engineers.
Working at Wayfair this summer proved to be an eye-opening and exciting experience, especially since it was my first tech internship. Even as an intern, I felt like a full-time employee at Wayfair, and was treated as such. I found that I could work hard and still have time to take advantage of the fun perks and events the company offered. In the end I came out of this experience much more knowledgeable, and ready to use what I have learned with my own projects. I’m glad I had the chance to work at Wayfair!
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If you are looking for a similar experience or to learn more about Wayfair’s internship program, please check your school’s job board for opportunities or reach out to campusrecruiting@wayfair.com.
