This summer, we welcomed 16 incredible students from universities across the US and Canada to our Santa Monica Headquarters for ZipRecruiter’s fourth annual software engineering internship.
When they weren’t exploring LA—whether it was catching waves, racing go-karts, making pottery, or making pasta from scratch—this cohort was busy embodying what it means to be a ZipRecruiter engineer. From day one, they brought our core values to life—building fearlessly, delivering excellence without ego and putting their hearts into work that matters.
Rather than sitting on the sidelines, our interns fully immersed themselves in their respective teams. They tackled complex challenges head-on and shipped meaningful work that directly impacts our customers and our broader engineering organization.
Here is a behind-the-scenes look at the memories we shared and the incredible projects our interns worked on this summer!
Intern Projects Spotlight
From their very first week, our interns were integrated into our core engineering teams to solve genuine technical problems. Operating across machine learning, mobile, big data, and full-stack development, they tackled complex challenges and shipped production code. Check out some of the amazing things they brought to life:
Andrew Park, Recommendations Team
“I was on the recommendations team, working on LLM-assisted cold-start recommendations. I thought it was a really interesting project because it directly shapes the first impression we can give new users, especially when we don’t have much information about them yet.”
Keshav Acharya, Applicant Engagement Team
“My project involved associating message threads with a “primary job”, allowing jobseekers and employers to be in sync regarding which job they are talking about and which job their meetings are relevant to. Anyone using our messages platform now gets to see the results of my work, and I’m very happy with the amount of traffic it’s getting!”
Lev Kochergin, Recommendations Ecosystem Team
“I researched improvements to embedding representations of jobs. The approaches I found boost performance across a wide swath of Zip’s services that utilize job information, from understanding candidate qualification to finding jobs of interest, while incurring minimal cost impact to embedding creation”
Sarah Ding, Employer Site Team
“My project focused on adding automated scheduled messages when an employer rates an applicant, with the goal of driving more conversations between employers and candidates... I built the architecture to support the new scheduled messaging system while also working closely with product and design to develop and refine the automation flow.”
Barry Zhang, FinDev Team
“I was on the FinDev team, responsible for migrating the finance/datalake from a batch reconstruction job to an events-based emission pipeline.”
Living Our Core Values
We can talk about our culture all day, but we’d rather let our interns tell you about it. From finding a welcoming community to truly living out our core values, here is how our interns experienced life at ZipRecruiter firsthand:
Carl Xu, Direct Employer Acq & Reactivation Team
“Everyone truly supports and wants the best for you. The best way to better yourself is by learning each and everyday, Zip fosters an environment to do just that.”
Sarah Ding, Employer Site Team
“I learned that ZipRecruiter really does take being “fearless builders” seriously! I was able to iterate quickly, and people genuinely wanted to see me try, learn, and succeed—even when that meant failing along the way. I loved being able to move quickly, whether that was having a lot of autonomy over my project or being able to push code and see my work come to life (got to launch an entirely new feature to prod!)”
Keshav Archarya, Applicant Engagement Team
“I loved the community and the culture here! Everyone is super supportive and offers to help out with any issues you might encounter. The intern program is also a ton of fun and gives you a chance to make lots of new friends right off the bat.”
Why ZipRecruiter?
With so many opportunities out there, we asked our interns what made ZipRecruiter the right choice for their summer:
Barry Zhang, FinDev Team
“I chose ZipRecruiter because the teams are smaller and more close-knit, thus I would get more visibility and ownership of the products that I build.”
Keshav Acharya, Applicant Engagement Team
“I chose to intern at ZipRecruiter because I wanted to work on products that would benefit users at a huge scale – and I got to do exactly that!”
Ronald Jin, Profile Registration Team
“I heard great things about ZipRecruiter’s culture, both from past interns and from people I spoke with in the interview process. I also liked that ZipRecruiter is solving a meaningful problem: helping people find jobs and employers find talent.”
Lev Kochergin, Recommendations Ecosystem Team
“ZipRecruiter was an unbelievably welcoming and supporting environment, from the hiring process to onboarding to working on projects… I was surrounded by people passionate about the work they do even before I was hired. People at Zip put a lot of care into their work and fostering a wonderful community around it.”
Advice for Future Interns
Who better qualified to give tips than those who’ve just lived the experience? Our interns had plenty of wisdom to share:
Andrew Park, Recommendations Team
“Spend some time getting to know people outside of your immediate team. There are people here with all sorts of backgrounds and experiences, and I genuinely enjoyed hearing about how they ended up where they are.
Ronald Jin, Profile Registration Team
“Don’t be afraid to share interesting findings or updates in public Slack channels, speak up in meetings, propose new ideas, schedule coffee chats, and find or create opportunities to present your work.”
Lev Kochergin, Recommendations Ecosystem Team
“Reach out to people. Working at Zip gives you access to people from various parts of the engineering team, and to collaborate with other teams. Reaching out to others gives you the opportunity to understand more of the business and get a fresh perspective on the work you’re doing.”
Barry Zhang, FinDev Team
“Try to network and have fun as much as possible. Even though I was trying to get learn as much as possible about software engineering, some of the best memories came from outside of work.”
It has been a privilege to witness the innovation, drive, and exceptional technical talent of our 2026 intern cohort. Whether their next step is joining us full-time, finishing their degrees, or exploring different horizons, they leave behind an amazing impact, and we look forward to cheering them on in all their future successes!
