Software and Performance Engineer Intern Rotations at Intel Headquarters
(Intel Headquarters in Santa Clara, CA)
I have been privileged to hold two positions at Intel Corporation. The first was as a Software Engineer, Intern in the Cloud Services Engineering Group with IT for the summer of 2014. The second was as a Performance Engineer, Intern in the Data Center Performance and Competitive Marketing Group within the Data Center Group from the previous internship until present. I know, I was off in Hillsboro, Oregon for over 14 months—at least it all counts towards my Intel sabbatical. In my first internship, I was hired (I believe) due to my exposure to Linux and Python. As a software engineer, I worked closely with the Database as a Service team to automate the setup and running of replicate database instances using Python for integration into OpenStack. I came into this internship with little exposure to databases and writing highly modular and distributed code (multiple machines; think cloud). My second internship, I was hired for my Linux and compiler understanding. As a performance engineer, my main duties were benchmarking Intel and other processors/SoC. Well, during my previous internship, I gained a fondness for automation. I mean, that's what computers are for, right? Making things simpler. So, by the full-time departure, I completed automating a majority of our benchmarks. Also, since I don't turn down challenges very often, I also lead in the creation of web apps and a whole web infrastructure for our team. After my year long internship, I was asked to work part-time remotely, which I am doing at the time of this post. Now, enough about me; more about Intel. Intel's culture is very much that of the go-getter attitude. They expect you to get up to speed quickly and adapt quickly. There are quite a lot of A-type, nose-to-the-grindstone personalities and you either sink-or-swim attitude in general. From my experience, they give you big projects. Projects that you can easily present and impress most, if not all, employers. In most cases, this comes with a lot of stress; however, I believe the wealth of knowledge you learn in return is definitely worth it. If you want a highly involved internship where you learn leading industry skill sets, you should definitely apply for an internship at Intel. You can find some of the Intel perks at this link:http://www.intel.com/content/dam/jobs/documents/intelbenefits-infographic.pdf