Growing our skills at a growing company: Why working for Glean worked for us

Over the past three months, we learned a ton from our internships at Glean, and the company grew right along with us. As the third and fourth interns (both software engineering interns on the product engineering team) at Glean, we received incredible mentorship. We watched the number of employees at the company nearly double from around 70 to 130 people, and before our eyes, the company morphed into a unicorn. That alone was pretty cool, but there were a lot of other reasons why our internships were so rewarding—and why interning at Glean might be a good fit for you.

Anyone can work on high-impact projects

From the very beginning, we were presented with multiple projects we could choose to pursue, many of which involved high-impact, customer-facing products. One of us was able to implement a performance optimization that helped search requests from the New Tab Page fire off on average 450 ms faster, translating to noticeable improvements for users. The ability and autonomy to choose our projects was something neither of us had seen at previous internships. Beyond that, we saw our efforts make a direct and tangible difference in the product, bringing us closer to both our customers and team.

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Productivity is valued

As we observed the efficiency of meetings within the company, we learned that one of Glean’s central values is giving employees as much time as possible to perform their functions at the highest level. This extends to the product engineering teams as well, where there is a culture of incorporating tools that will help increase engineer productivity.  

Another of our projects was to design and build an automated component testing system with Storybook that would help prevent component regressions. It was really neat to see that, not long after building the system and writing some documentation, many engineers on the team were already adjusting to the new workflow. They were even asking us questions about how they could extend the system for their own niche use cases. The curiosity about, and proactivity around, internal optimizations like this one truly made us feel like we were working with an all-star team of engineers who constantly strived to improve their speed of execution.

A team-oriented culture of respect

While Glean was growing as a company, we grew as individuals and professionals. We had the unique opportunity to work directly with a variety of highly experienced industry individuals. Because of this, the opportunities to learn were limitless.  Despite Glean’s team doubling over our three-month internship, our teammates were always extremely helpful and available to us. We were always able to ask questions and share our opinions, knowing our voices were heard and valued.

Consider joining!

If what we described sounds interesting to you, keep an eye out for internship or full-time openings and reach out! 

Authors: Alix Cui and David Liu, software engineering interns on Glean's product engineering team