Supercharge Your Career: Be an Engineering Intern at airasia Super App

by Joojo Dadzebo Amoquandoh Dontoh

Great internships provide an immersive experience into a company’s day-to-day culture and a hands-on opportunity to solve real problems. It also allows interns to build relationships, grow their networks and use the experience to elevate their career trajectory.

At airasia Super App, we have designed our internship program to nurture individuals equipped to embark on an illustrious career. As a fast-growing company where products are constantly being developed and iterated, interns at airasia Super App get the opportunity to make impactful contributions to an exciting growth story.

This article will provide a flavour of the engineering internship life cycle at airasia Super App, specifically with the User Identity management team.

Process

Introduction: Meeting the Team

This is the very first stage after an intern has been confirmed to join a team. The team holds a small meeting to meet the intern(s) for introduction. This introduction involves giving a brief background about all parties involved, the positions and soft hierarchy within the engineers of the team, and portions of the system that various engineers are familiar with.

This step is very important because it breaks the ice by creating a soft environment for interns to know they are now part of the team and can ask for help from the right source whenever they need it. It’s all love out here! 😁

Stack introduction

This can be considered as the first stage of ushering the interns into the work that is done on the team. At this stage, a permanent engineer of the team will first explain the stack used on the team and why it was chosen. The engineer also moves on to explain the entirety of the service, how it works and some key important points to note. This explanation includes a small background of the service, its present condition and potential upgrades for the near future. The engineer will move on to breakdown the inner workings of the various sub-services used by the team. Ad-hoc services and scripts will however be introduced to interns on a needs basis because the intention is not to swarm them with information but to provide a working knowledge of how things behave.

Self learning (optional)

This stage of the process is tagged optional because of its dependence on the working knowledge of the intern. In this case, it’s a plus if the intern already knows the various tiers of a system (the presentation layer, the logic layer and the database layer) and how they work.

For example, if the intern has no experience with APIs they may have to do some basic reading on APIs and server-side development. A little background on the stack we use may also be helpful if they don’t already have that. Most of the engineers on the team undertake full-stack activities in which the interns are expected to get involved with.

Test run

In this stage a little assignment is given to the interns to help build their capacity while working in an industrial environment. The assignment tests most facets of the development process including planning, extraction of functional and non-functional requirements, delegation, design pattern choice, endpoint naming, etc.

This assessment is not for evaluation purposes but to encourage learning by doing since it is usually by doing that one learns the most. Review processes during the test run happen on live calls and are a bit more detailed because of all the teachable moments in that process.

In the case of the User Identity management team, the assignment provided is one that is a mixture of frontend and backend builds, given that time is limited during internships. This process will depend on the learning speed of individual interns. Interns who pick information up pretty quickly may be moved to the next stage halfway through the test run.

Production code familiarity and permissions provision

At this stage the intern is deemed ready for exposure to production code. The process is however taken on slowly by allowing the interns to write tests where non-existent or for new features. Writing tests with maximum coverage where possible allows the intern to carefully go through the code for breaking points while reviewing statements and branches. The interns are encouraged to provide suggestions, improvements and concerns on any they may find in the code because, moments such as these provide avenues for discussions and teachable moments for all parties involved.

Contribution to production

Finally the interns will be given a chance to make additions to code that actually influences the day-to-day business of the company. Contributing to production code means joining thought-provoking discussions that dissect business requirements, communicating and corresponding with other teams, and providing suggestions that are either considered or polished. This instills a sense of pride and a point of knowledge acquisition that provides a feeling of accomplishment.

Challenges

One of the most obvious challenges is to find and diversify the assignments we give to the interns. Wherever possible, we try to provide an assignment that encompasses all/most aspects of the software design life cycle to maximize knowledge retention and acquisition.

Another challenge can be found in the time the interns spend with the team. While internships usually last between 1 and 6 months, the timeframe may not be enough to expose the interns to production scenarios that otherwise cannot be formally taught. Working within the limited timeframe, the team endeavours to sufficiently equip the interns and maximise the impact of their work. Interns who perform well are of course invited to apply for a full-time role at the super app, and to continue their good work with us. :)

Conclusion

At airasia Super App, the team tries to focus on the learning points of the interns, hence the various detailed phases above. This process has proven quite effective as there is nothing short of praise from interns that have gone through the pipeline at airasia Super App. Here are a few testimonials.

“Working in User Identity management team, makes me able to deal with software tools, runtime environment and programming language that I have never experienced before such as Gitlab, Postman, Jira, Confluence, nodeJS and JavaScript. Being the only girl working in the team makes me believe in woman power!! 8 months duration of internship has never been easy for me. It was long but I enjoyed everything that I learned.” — Farzana Athirah

“I am really grateful for my internship in Airasia. I had the opportunity to work on a modern web development stack and, picked up nodeJS and next/reactJS along the way. I also appreciate the open culture that made it easy for me to ask questions and seek for help. My time here exposed me to the actual working world and it definitely made me a better software engineer!” — Jing Quan Kueh

“First of all, I’m appreciative of the opportunity to have an internship with AirAsia, the journey here is amazing! Friendly seniors, especially the willingness for them to share their professional knowledge. It really helps me a lot to pick things up quickly. Also appreciate the learning and exposure arrangement from the team from different technology stack and code disciplines. Perhaps I could apply these knowledge in near future to kick start my career as a software engineer!” — Leow Cheng Fung

“I’ve been working at AirAsia as a software engineering intern for the past 4 months and I absolutely love this place. I never felt stuck as I’ve always received enough guidance when needed by my superiors and tens/hundreds of programmers here. Besides, being able to work from home when I don’t feel like going to the office is a huge plus point for me as I could save a lot of time from not commuting to and from work, especially during the fasting month. AirAsia has a proper engineering culture and tech features are developed quickly as engineers work in small teams, making them productive. The bottom line is, I’m happy working at AirAsia as a member of Gen Z and I could see the endless opportunities for me to learn and develop myself as a programmer and person.” — Mohmed Ishak

“My journey in Airasia leveled up my skills and my experience. I’m so thankful to have my internship at Airasia which helped me to grow professionally in my career. Moreover, the most likable thing in my journey at Airasia is how the team helped and guided me to boost my learning process.” — Esam Bin Mahfoodh

If you are looking to start an engineering internship in airasia Super App, I hope this article gives you a snapshot of life as an intern here. Hope to see you soon😉