Shopify

Storefront perf work — shaved TTFB on a template path that actually hit prod. Fall intern group was 6 people so standups felt personal. Hybrid 3 days/week was my sweet spot.

Payments code is scary in a good way — double-check everything culture. Fixed a rounding edge case on a fee calculation. Fall cohort meant I actually knew all 6 interns by name.

Built a churn model the merchant success team actually referenced in QBRs — first time ML work left the notebook. dbt + Spark pipeline was already there, I wasn't duct-taping a Kaggle setup like school projects.

Shipped a merchant settings screen in Compose before term ended — showed up on a real release train. Emulator setup took 2 days though, Gradle config is no joke.

First real industry job and a solid one. The Shopify mobile app has millions of merchants on it so shipping anything to prod felt meaningful. Weekly 1:1s with my manager were actually useful, not just status updates. Pay was good for a winter co-op.

The autonomy is real. Shipped a feature that moved checkout conversion by ~0.8% which sounds tiny but at Shopify's scale that actually matters. Everyone I worked with was approachable and I felt like a real employee from the first week, not just an intern they're babysitting.