We're getting engineering interns 

This September, five co-op students from the University of Waterloo (UW) are joining our Engineering org for a 16-week term, working out of a brand-new office in downtown Toronto through late December. It's the first time we've run a program like this, and we didn't want to build just another internship (so we didn't). Here's how it came together, and why we think it's going to be something special.

Let’s start with the most important piece. Why are we doing this?

The primary answer is simple. We want to invest in the next generation of software engineers, at a moment when the market is a genuinely uncertain place for junior engineers. A lot of companies have pulled back on early-career hiring. We think that's short-sighted. The talent coming out of school right now is exceptional (we saw that firsthand in Waterloo), and betting on it early is how you end up with great engineers who deeply understand your product, your customers, and your culture.

It's also a bet that pays off both ways. The next generation of engineering students have been AI-native since their first year of school. They almost certainly think about and approach their work differently than many of us who have been in the industry for decades already. We’re hoping to learn from them, too. With the right scoping and guidance, there's also plenty of valuable roadmap work they can own outright, which frees up more of our senior and staff engineers to dig deeper on the particularly challenging problems.

As a globally distributed remote company, we needed to determine where and how we would hire students from.

With this being our first time hiring engineering co-op students, we wanted to work with a reputable school with a strong Engineering program and an established, well-structured co-op program. We also wanted it to be in an area with a high concentration of Amis (what we call our colleagues) in our engineering department. This led us to the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, and to the University of Waterloo.

Waterloo is located approximately an hour from Toronto in Ontario, Canada. The region boasts one of the most innovative and fastest-growing entrepreneurial tech ecosystems globally, with the second-highest density of startup activity per capita in the world—trailing only Silicon Valley.

The University of Waterloo is world-renowned for its Engineering program, and in particular, the quality of the graduates it produces. In 2026, UW was ranked 27th for Computer Science and 40th for Artificial Intelligence out of almost 600 universities around the world.

Beyond this, we have over a dozen Amis in and around the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, which meets our "Ami concentration requirement," and means plenty of opportunity to get local folks involved in the fun.

Initially, we had planned to do this all remotely. We have no physical office anywhere in the world, with our teammates spread across more than 30 countries. But hiring a cohort of students from a single school gave us the opportunity to do something unique. With big hopes, big plans, and a big an appropriately-sized, reasonable, CFO-approved budget (we love you, Zhi!), we began planning what an in-person co-op term might look like.

With the term set to take place in-person, naturally our interview process needed to, as well. So two of us made the trek to Waterloo for a week of interviews in our search for students. Four days. Twenty interviews. Lots of coffee.

We weren’t sure if we were making the right choice doing the interviews in person. Would it turn candidates off of applying? Would it make us seem outdated? Would it be confusing given that our organization is entirely remote? Or would it be seen as a novelty, or a differentiator? We decided to take the risk, and we were glad that we did. Several candidates told us the in-person interview itself made us stand out, noting that it was the first in-person interview they’d had in four years, and that it was really nice to meet their potential employer face-to-face before joining.

We also weren’t sure what to expect of the candidates themselves. Would our questions be too challenging? Would students struggle to work through the technical challenges? But the quality of the people across the table was, frankly, incredible. Narrowing twenty impressive candidates down to five has genuinely been one of the hardest parts of the program so far.

In the end, we did manage to narrow down our list, and we’re incredibly hyped to have five students join us in just a few weeks!

Being a fully remote company means (despite having decided to do the co-op program in person) we still had exactly zero square feet of office space to put these five people in. So the week after interviews, we headed to Toronto to tour co-working spaces. Six of them, back to back in a single day, scored against a rubric we’d built ahead of time covering both the spaces themselves and the location.

Some spaces were bright and fun and the buildings were cool and full of energy. We liked those. Other spaces were sad and dark and the buildings were whisper-quiet. We didn’t like those.

By early afternoon we had a clear winner. A bright suite in the Fashion District, just 10 minutes from Union Station, with lots of windows, private office spaces, a big patio, good meeting rooms, and standing desks all around. We negotiated, signed, and now have a 17-person office in the heart of downtown Toronto from September through December!

Here's the part we're most excited about. The default failure mode for intern programs is sideline work; interns get a sandbox project that nobody's waiting on, while the meaningful roadmap work happens around them. We're deliberately not doing that. Each of the five co-ops will be embedded directly onto one of our squads — In-App, Messaging Channels, Workflows, Content, and Audiences — with a focus on tangible, valuable, customer-facing roadmap work alongside the rest of their team. They’ll also work closely with a dedicated senior or staff-level engineer as a mentor throughout the term.

By the end of the term, each student will be able to point to real, meaningful work that they’ve shipped to customers around the world at scale.

But an office with five interns and nobody else in it is basically just a very expensive study hall. So the other half of the program borrows more from a startup accelerator cohort than a traditional internship:

• A rotating cast, every week. We're flying engineers and leaders into the Toronto office throughout the term, with a new pair arriving each week. Over 16 weeks the co-ops will work alongside dozens of different people from across the company, not just their own squad.
• Direct access to leadership. Engineering Managers, Directors, VPs, and members of the executive team will all spend time in the office during the program. We’ll even have our entire C-Team in the office for a week in October, giving students an opportunity for face time with leaders across the business.
• Customers, in the room. We're also planning to bring some Toronto-area customers into the office so the students can hear directly from the people who actually use what they're building. The more they understand the business and not just the codebase, the better engineers they'll be.

Each co-op student will wrap up their term with a presentation directly to the CEO, giving them an opportunity to showcase their impact over the four-month program.

The cohort lands September 8. The office is almost ready, initial projects are scoped, onboarding is prepped, and the week one welcome dinner is booked. We’ll have more to share throughout the term as things officially get rolling.

To the five of you joining us this fall: we built this whole thing for you, and we can't wait to get started!

And if you're reading this and thinking, "hey, that sounds like a cool place to work," you should check out our open roles and apply.