5 Reasons Why You Should Pick Super for Your Next Internship: Analytics Engineering Edition

During this Fall 2022 semester, I interned at Super (FKA Snapcommerce) as an analytics engineer intern. If I had to sum up my experience in three words: fun, rewarding and transformative.

Background

A little about me before we dive into my time at Super, in high school, I never imagined I’d become a coder. I was convinced I wanted to be a doctor. Luckily, two days before students had to decide what university and program to accept, I made the bold decision of throwing my career plan out the window, and taking an offer at the University of Waterloo for a Bachelor’s in Mathematics.

During my first year, I took my first computer science course and immediately fell in love. Taking a Python class pushed me to apply my newly acquired skills to build things.

As a statistics major the world of Artificial Intelligence was intriguing. I dabbled in AI and data science for a while, in fact, my first internship was as a machine learning researcher. The more I learned about the world of data and AI, the more I realized I knew nothing. I decided I wanted to diversify my skill set to areas outside of machine learning to learn more about what the world of data had to offer.

That is where my internship at Super comes in.

Interning at Super

If you asked me to describe my experience at Super in one word, it would be super (I just had to!). I joined the data platform team as an analytics engineer intern, which is a combined role where data engineering meets data analysis. I wanted to be exposed to the world of data outside of data science, and that is exactly what I got!

Here are the five key takeaways that made for a Super experience.

1. Being an Owner

The thing I loved most about working at Super was the ownership and responsibility. Despite being an intern, I was given high priority tasks that drove big impact. Interns don’t often get the chance to take on such responsibility, but that was not the case at Super. I was given the opportunity to take full ownership of complex projects that required handling multiple timelines and stakeholders. It is safe to say that the work I did truly mattered.

As an analytics engineer, I gained exposure to data pipelines and models. I got the chance to:

• Refactor and modify some large and complex data models in dbt.
• Develop DAG tasks to upload data to accounting software using Airflow.
• Conduct analyses and investigations to resolve data related issues.
• Implement unit tests for complicated data modeling logic.

For most of my internship I worked in our finance team, contributing to finance data models, and the integration with our accounting software. The code I wrote was responsible for applying complex business logic to account for revenue for new product features, as well as building data tests and interacting with stakeholders in product engineering and accounting. I was able to see direct impacts each sprint of my work, leading to increased revenue, and fewer data issues as the accounting team did their work.

Throughout these experiences, I learned more than I can even explain. I was exposed to production level data systems, something I could not experience in a course, a textbook, or even a side project. I learned about how the many technologies I hear about are tied together to create functioning systems. At the end of every week I would reflect on what I learned and would sometimes be surprised at how much I was able to absorb. In my opinion that is what sets an internship at Super apart. You are treated like an actual full time employee. You are given challenging problems that force you to grow. They say the best way to learn is by doing, and at Super, I got to do a lot.

2. Meaningful Mentorship

Although I was pushed to grow and learn, I was never stressed or overwhelmed by the difficulty nor quantity of work that was assigned. My mentor (shoutout to Da Wang) was always there to answer questions, provide support and step in when things got out of control. Furthermore, the managers within my team were always understanding and helpful. I never felt pressured to show results. This support system facilitated my growth and learning by eliminating any fear of taking on challenging responsibilities. This support net significantly boosted my confidence, allowing me to seek out difficult and high impact tasks with tight deadlines.

3. Moving Fast With Intention

If we zoom out from my personal tasks, and take a look at the team and company culture as a whole, there are plenty of things I loved about Super. Despite being a well sized company now — about 250 people — Super moves and behaves much like a start up. One of our values, “Move fast with intention”, is truly permeated throughout the company’s operations. I did not have to deal with any slow or inefficient procedures. There was no unpleasant corporate red tape or tedious bureaucratic policy. Things always moved quickly, which is much appreciated. I think this company value was best illustrated by my onboarding process. My development environment was up within my first day, I was writing code on my second day of work and had made two pull requests before the end of my first week!

4. The Toolkits for Success

Something I enjoyed that often gets overlooked were our tools and organization. Super uses this tool called Glean, which acts as a Google search for your company’s systems. If I had a question, I would Glean it! I cannot count the number of times I was blocked and Glean found some old Slack thread, or Confluence page that had the solution I was looking for.

Super has what we call a “Written Culture”. As companies grow in size, the difficulty of knowledge transfer grows exponentially. Our CEO, Hussein, wrote a great article about this here. By fostering a culture of reading and writing, we are able to efficiently share knowledge in a consistent manner. Combine this written culture with the search capabilities of Glean and you’ve got a combo that can answer almost any question you’ve got!

Besides excellent organization and tools, Super also offers some many unique benefits to interns. I was given a $300 work from home budget with which I bought a cool new keyboard and webcam! I also got a $300 learning and development budget that I spent on books I’ve always wanted to read and $120 as part of a health and wellness program. Lastly, and probably my favorite, was the $25 UberEats voucher we got every Friday. As if Friday’s aren’t the best already!

5. Unbeatable Culture

Another thing I appreciated about my internship was my team’s culture. It felt less like a team, and more like a group of friends working on a project. It was within our team’s culture to make conscious efforts to scrutinize whether a process produced enough value to be continued, and if not, we would change or discard it. This made for a very pleasant, automated and efficient workflow.

As an eager learner who is always trying to grow, I greatly appreciate feedback. Super’s openness and transparency meant that my teammates were always happy to give me honest feedback which facilitated my personal development. Anyone can speak to anyone at Super. I got the chance to chat one on one with almost everyone on my team, some outside my team, and even with our two co-founders.

All in all, It is safe to say that I had a great time here at Super. I learned so much about being a better engineer, teammate, employee, owner and human. I met some great people, and had loads of fun!

If you want to join the Super team and learn more about the internship program — check out our careers page.