I realize we are well into October, and our awesome summer engineering interns have gone back to college, but I have a good excuse for why this post is late. Most of our engineering interns are still working with us part time while they attend school. I am biased, but I believe this has a lot to say about the Zillow Internship program and the efforts we make to ensure students have a great summer with us. At Zillow, we don’t have our engineering interns working on side projects and tools that no one cares about. We have our interns working on projects that are very important to our business and consumer experience.
Our engineering team is organized into small product teams with anywhere from 5-10 engineers on each team. We embed interns in these teams and assign them a mentor to further help the intern ramp up on our technology and code base and to help answer questions along the way. This year, we had placements on several teams: mobile, community, real estate shopping, professional tools and services and a new team that is working on some things we can’t quite talk about yet. Projects involved writing native mobile applications on our Android platform, improving back-end services that power our real estate shopping experience — where speed and scalability are key factors — and innovating on our consumer, Web-based user interface. These projects involved new technologies, mostly Open Source, which will be relevant regardless of where they go to work after graduating.
Of course, we can’t let the summer go by without some fun outings. This year’s highlights included a WhirlyBall tournament and an event on Lake Washington back when the weather was a bit warmer.
Today we will be attending the University of Washington Computer Science and Engineering (UW CSE) recruiting event. Zillow will be there in force, so stop by our table, say hi and drop off a resume. We’d love to talk with you about our open positions. We are already recruiting for next summer’s internships in development, test and program management, as well as full-time positions. If you have already graduated or will be graduating soon, we’d love to talk with you about positions we have open right now. This will be our eighth year recruiting at UW, and we have been so fortunate to attract some incredible interns as well as quite a group of full-time employees over the years. Come join us!
It’s worth noting that we have a competitive compensation package as well as a fun work environment just a block from Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle, with lots of free food and cool people to work with!