My name is Ali Salman, I’m a last year computer engineering student at Budapest University of Technology and Economics. This summer, I was an engineering intern at Wise in Budapest for 10 weeks. 

Finding out about the internship

My journey with Wise started a while before the internship itself. As a student who had some extra time, I was looking for a part time job to earn some money and professional experience along with studying. I wasn’t looking for something specific so when I stumbled upon Wise’s customer support roles’ advertisements, they grabbed my attention. I was mainly looking for a flexible job to keep up with working on my personal projects and attending classes, and Wise highlighted that. So I applied and got accepted and started working at Wise. 

What was missing for me at that time was having real life software engineering experience. Being part of Wise, I got introduced to the culture and friendly working environment that prompts exploring your own solutions and learning from mistakes. These were important things for me to note about a place I would like to intern at. The ideas of autonomous teams and taking ownership of your projects resonated with me.

Application, selection and pre-starting

I applied for the internship through Wise's career site, just like everyone else applying as an external candidate to Wise. The selection process starts with a HackerRank test that involves questions related to frameworks used at Wise.

The interview was a pair programming session with two of the engineers at Wise. My strategy was to prepare and study heavily for the topics of the test and the interview, and to ask questions. 

The recruiters and the interviewers were helpful with providing tips on how to best prepare for the interview and explaining the questions. During the interview, it’s helpful to think out loud to showcase your thought process and how you approach problems.

A few days after, I got an offer from Wise for the summer internship which I accepted the day after. 

In the weeks leading up to starting the internship there was a lot of communication regarding paperwork and contracts. I also received a list of potential teams to join. I was asked for my preference and I ended up joining the SWIFT team.

3 offices in 9 days

By the time the first day finally arrived, I had worked at Wise for several months but it still felt different to come to the office as an engineering intern. On that day I met the other Budapest interns, the recruiters, got my laptop set up and met my team leader.

The rest of the week was spent in London. We had a day to travel and settle there, and two days for the company onboarding. All the interns from Budapest, Tallinn and London were there. Wise planned a lot of activities for these two days to get to know the company and the other interns. This included a very inspirational session with the Design Lead that worked on Wise’s rebrand in March and a scavenger hunt in Shoreditch. In the evenings, I met with other interns for walks around the city of London. 

The following week, my team was attending company planning events in Tallinn, Estonia. Thanks to my Team Lead telling me the week prior, I was able to attend these and I flew to Tallinn after less than one day of being in Budapest. That way, I’ve been to all the major Wise European offices in less than two weeks. 

Going to Tallinn was very useful to know what my team had been working on, and what they plan to work on next. Wise works in squads that, to a large extent, make their own decisions on what to implement and how to help customers. That week I got to know how other teams organise their work, met with product managers, analysts, operations teams, and even the CEO and co-founder Kristo Käärmann was in those meetings. 

Most importantly, my team is spread across Budapest, London, and Tallinn. This was an opportunity to meet the other engineers and operations specialists that I will be working with later.

Making things faster

My project was about optimising an internal tool that is used by our operations teams. As Wise is growing more and more every year, the way this tool was implemented before was making it struggle to produce results and catch up with the larger amount of information we are processing.

The third week was when I finally started making changes and submitted my first pull request. This wouldn’t be possible without the help of my buddy, who is a more experienced engineer that I was assigned to turn to in case of questions and for help throughout the duration of the internship. 

I first needed to investigate the use cases and what’s causing the current implementation to fail. I had several meetings with operations agents to discuss how they used the tool – some of whom I met in Tallinn. 

I ended up working on a myriad of things, including query optimization, backend code structure improvements, and implementing changes in the frontend while keeping backward compatibility.