In November, Beacon opened applications for its 2023 Summer Internship Program which includes opportunities across different teams such as product management, product, and engineering. To learn more about the program, we asked some of our 2022 interns to talk about their initial interest in Beacon and to share their internship experiences. Here are highlights from the conversations.

Position and Projects

Dario, FOS Integrations Engineer: I interned on the Front Office System Integrations team. My project this summer was working on a FIX message parser, which means taking messages between exchanges such as trade reports and then making them more human friendly. This enables the user to read them better–similar to Beacon’s Glint.

Reaz, Client Engineer: I worked on the client engineering team and created tools to make the lives of the client engineers smoother. One tool integrates Jira tickets within the Beacon IDE, making it easier for engineers to view their tickets and send out summaries to Slack. 

Vinay, Sales Engineer : I interned on the sales engineering team and spoke a lot with the sales organization; I primarily worked on an asset manager special project. This entailed creating a data infrastructure for asset managers that will create several opportunities to visualize their data. 

Yuxing, UX/UI Designer: I interned on the Glint team as a UX/UI Designer. This position enabled me to work across the company on various projects. I also had the chance to work with financial products, which is new to me, but it was a great experience to expand my design skills. 

Start-up opportunities

Ella, Client Engineering: I was drawn to Beacon for a few reasons. I liked that it is a startup; the role appealed to me, and Beacon’s values resonated with me. And I especially liked the emphasis on diversity and women in technology. It’s great to see so many women in senior roles at Beacon. I think this is an amazing company; it’s very approachable and it offers opportunities that other companies don’t have. 

Vinay, Sales Engineer: The primary thing that drew me to Beacon was the role.I’ve always been very interested in splitting my time 50% on the technical side and 50% on the business side, synthesizing business problems. So sales engineering fits pretty nicely into this particular interest of mine. Beacon is a growing company and I felt that it would be very interesting to be a part of.

Abriele, Platform Engineer: I’m interested in platform engineering and wanted to learn more about this. Working at a start-up also appealed to me. Beacon provided an opportunity for all of this as well as diverse projects. From the start, it was a great fit.

Ben, Platform Security Engineer: Working for Beacon had been a steep learning curve but it was also very rewarding. My role as a Platform Security Engineer tied in brilliantly while I’m studying for a Cyber Security degree. It also provided an opportunity to seek advice from other members of my team and beyond, along with being able to pick their brains for endless knowledge to help me in my final year of studies.The culture here was very welcoming and it was clear that everyone is incredibly passionate and motivated about their work.

What motivates you?

Shobhan, Quantitative Developer: I like learning new things, applying them, and seeing the results. Working with my team this summer gave me an opportunity to do this. Whenever I experimented with something or I was stuck, my team was really helpful and gave me tips on how to tackle these challenges. And through that experience I learned a lot that will help me in my career and my future.

Reaz, Client Engineer: I often get asked if I’m an extrovert or introvert; I feel like I am both at the same time. Being at Beacon working as a client engineer, you enter and exit both worlds: perform engineering tasks independently and also deal with clients. Client Engineering provided the perfect opportunity for me to expand both my technical and communication skills. 

Tainon, Foundations Engineer: I like solving fun problems, and Beacon has no shortage of them! I also enjoy applying new skills and concepts I picked up over the course of my internship. When I worked on my first project, it took a long time to get up to speed with everything. However, as I gained experience, the work started feeling much more intuitive. Seeing this gradual process happen, and its end result, was very motivating. 

Ali, Security Engineer: These past three months were a steep learning curve for me. I became more confident in applying my skills to practice. I now understand the field I want to be working in better. This summer I worked with two other interns and our manager was an endless source of information. He dedicated a lot of time teaching us about various topics and concepts and enjoyed passing his experience and knowledge to us. The culture is great here and everybody is positive and motivating.

Ben, Platform Security Engineer: I’ve been motivated by the range of projects I worked on from the security-based ones to the tools for the sales engineering team. I really appreciated this diversity and the opportunity to learn new things. My manager was an endless pool of knowledge so I enjoyed asking questions and learning from him–different stuff than what I learn at university. 

Yuxing, UX/UI Designer: Being a part of the Glint team at Beacon has been very motivating. My manager Mia started earlier as the first designer on the Glint team and I joined her as a second one, so everything has been pretty new to us. But this has provided interesting challenges, enabling me to learn a lot from different projects, whether it’s solving UX problems or building products from scratch. It’s been exciting to work across different teams that have provided experiences to solve real-world problems–something I can’t get in design school.

To learn more about the 2023 Summer Internship Program, please take a look at these opportunities: https://www.beacon.io/careers/.