As I wrap up my summer internship here at AppLovin, I am blown away by how much I have learned in just a few months. I started June 17th with anticipation about what my summer job would entail, but AppLovin’s welcoming culture allowed me to quickly settle in and achieve success in an ever-changing environment.
The mobile gaming landscape is complex, competitive, and challenging to navigate. There’s huge growth happening, and with it comes shifts in the way people use their phones to play games. From a technical standpoint, building a system to service billions of devices presents a constant stream of stimulating challenges. This coupled with startup culture makes for a very exciting opportunity.
In early-stage companies, teams are always working hard to find efficiencies wherever they can to stay lean and maximize the value that is being created. Because of this, employees are expected to do their best. You have responsibility from the get-go—on my first day, I was tasked with learning how to multithread in Golang. AppLovin is a company where you will be surrounded by passionate people who have ownership of their work. AppLovin trusts its employees to get things done, and it’s this type of accountability that really drives you to give your best and helps you grow immensely. It won’t be easy, but if you find yourself gravitating toward a startup, then you’re likely wanting to be challenged.
AppLovin interns participating in fun events.
Making an impact
In school, we learn how to use a number of tools, but we don’t necessarily get to apply that knowledge in a work environment. As an Infrastructure Engineer, you work to ensure that all the software systems within a business can operate in harmony. There’s a lot that goes into this, from building simple web applications and simply getting things to work, to thinking about how things might fall apart when being used billions of times. This scope may be a little shocking when you start out. Additionally, since you’re responsible for fixing issues throughout the tech stack, you have to understand the impact of what you do from a systems perspective.
AppLovin is the place where you’ll get to put theories you’ve learned about networking and load balancing into practice. What you do ends up being utilized by AppLovin, and it will live on even after your internship is complete. Whether I was working on making a service for data collection or bolstering security in communications protocols, I was always learning about new constraints to keep in mind that I had never thought about before. Being an infrastructure engineer is an energizing experience, and you’ll leave a company like AppLovin with broader depth and increased breadth of technical knowledge.
Thank you AppLovin!
AppLovin interns attending lunch-and-learns.
Even though I’ve only been an intern at AppLovin for a couple of months, I’m so grateful for this experience. My mentor, Joseph Milla, pushed me to strive to hone my craft. Lunch-and-learns with many of the people who have been here from AppLovin’s earliest days have helped me understand what it’s like to work for a budding company. I was fortunate enough to be on the Infrastructure team and it provided a great view into the inner workings of a software company. I’ve learned that there are way more ingredients that go into a successful tech company than I had originally thought—AppLovin has built a strong, dynamic team to compete in the mobile games space. Anyone who joins this team will quickly learn that AppLovin has a strong foundation to handle any changes that may happen in the future.
