In 2020, and again in 2022, GitLab established an internship program that offers students, graduates, career switchers, and those returning to the workforce an opportunity to further their careers. Our goal is to run an inclusive engineering internship program to provide all qualifying candidates with a fair and equal opportunity. This program allows us to create opportunities for candidates, diversify the experience levels of our teams, and bring fresh perspectives to our initiatives.
On this page, you'll learn more about how we first began this program, how to get involved as an engineering team, and how to request an intern for your team.
As we head into 2023, we are evaluating our internship offerings in the Engineering Devision. When positions become available we will post the link to apply on this page.
To validate and refine our approach to offering internships at an all-remote company, we launched a program between May 2020 and August 2020. In 2022 we iterated on this process, introducing an associate level for backend, frontend, and fullstack positions as an option for hiring and a pathway from internships.
Requests for opening an intern requisition will be evaluated on the following criteria:
The team manager and mentors will also need to be able to actively participate in the interview process.
The process for opening an intern requisition would be as follows:
The following criteria are considered required for candidates to be eligible for Engineering Internship positions:
Preference given to candidates with proven experience
As an example of an intern position in our job families please review the Software Engineering Intern job family for further details.
The ideal duration is a minimum of three months. Internships will last no more than six months. The expectation is that interns move to grow into associate or intermediate level engineers (example) at the end of their internship. The review of the level will be performed at the end of the internship.
An internship can start as soon as both the intern and the company are ready to begin.
The internship program is all-remote. The countries where we are currently hiring interns can be found on the employment solutions handbook page.
The intern can choose to relocate themselves to a region where there happens to be a cluster of GitLab employees who co-work together (when not during the pandemic). But expenses, travel documentation, and all other considerations need to be handled by the intern. They should keep their manager informed of any plans. If the intern converts to a full-time hire all conditions of their country-of-residence must be met related to their country of residence.
Below is an example of a 4-month internship program:
Internships at GitLab offered in the framework described on this page will be paid and follow the same logic as that depicted in our Compensation Calculator and according to our Global Compensation Principles. This means that, as usual, the San Francisco benchmark, location and experience factors will be taken into account during the recruitment process and before making an offer. Depending on country regulations, we will have to align with national labor laws.
For interns we will target students or career switchers and would look at our Talent community. We would not limit candidate intake to university students and are open to all qualifying candidates.
We exclusively focus all our active sourcing activities on candidates from underrepresented groups.
We advertise on all the traditional talent acquisition platforms as well as the GitLab vacancies page. Additional advertising is done on internship focussed job boards (e.g. Youtern, angel.co etc.)
We proactively reach out to and engage with universities/colleges to hold a Virtual Careers Talk to encourage students at those universities to apply. Also, we reach out to any associations within these universities that represent underrepresented groups and hold Virtual Careers Talk with them.
We plan to hold virtual talks at universities in the following regions: AMER, EMEA and APAC.
For intern candidates we are setting the bar high at the application stage and apply a similar process as to other level roles at GitLab. On this page you can view a typical timeline for our hiring process.
After the internship the aim would be to hire the intern as an Associate Engineer (depending on previous experience). The timeline for hiring decisions in a 4 month program would be as follows:
If an offer is not made or an offer is not accepted, there are opportunities to stay in touch with GitLab's team or People Business Partner and re-enter a conversation at a later time.
Upon the completion of the internship, participating teams will be asked to complete
a retrospective. This will follow the process used for GitLab's monthly team retrospectives.
Engineering managers should create an issue in the gitlab-com/engineering-internships project using the Retrospective template and customize it for their team. This issue will initially be confidential.
During the retrospective all team members should be encouraged to contribute, even if they didn't work directly with the intern, so that a complete picture of the effect on the team can be built.
Following the retrospective period the issues will be made public.
The feedback survey provides interns with the opportunity to freely express views about working at GitLab. The People Connect Team will send the Feedback Survey to all interns 2 days prior to the pilot completion. The People Business Partner & the intern may proactively set up time to discuss their responses and ask for further information. The feedback survey are not mandatory, however your input will help provide GitLab with information regarding what worked well and what can be improved in future iterations.
