Data Team Internships
Introduction
Welcome to the Data Team Internship Program page. The Enterprise Data team is excited to help interested GitLab team members experience life in the fast-paced, results-oriented, and rapidly-evolving world of Data! This program follows the GitLab Internship for Learning Program and is focused on supporting career development for existing GitLab Team Members.
- Slack Channel:
#data - Internship for Learning
- Data Onboarding Issue
How Does Data Internship For Learning Work?
We seek to partner every incoming Data Team Intern with a Mentor - a current individual contributor Data Team member who has the capacity and skills to help interns onboard to our data stack, learn about best practices in the field of data, and deliver a data project.
A team member who is interested in exploring an internship with the Data Team is encouraged to:
- Discuss their interest with their manager
- Schedule a coffee chat with a member of the data team to learn more about different focus areas in the team
- Open an Internship for Learning issue
To formalize the beginning of an internship, the following should be documented in the issue:
- The intern should document the time allocation for the program that has been agreed upon with their manager (for Data Team internships, this typically ranges from 25%-50% with a 1 quarter commitment)
- A member of Data Team leadership should confirm capacity for the internship in the specified quarter
- A mentor should be assigned for the duration of the internship
- A project with clear outcomes & deliverables should be documented, with agreement among the intern, mentor, and managers involved
Criteria For Assessing Data Team Internship Requests
Requests to create a Data Team Intern position will be evaluated on the following criteria:
- Team Size, Maturity, and Need
- How established is the team the intern will be joining? Is this an established team with processes, roles, a roadmap, and backlog?
- Will the team be able to take on an intern without risking a decrease in velocity?
- Would the team benefit from an intern to support a more senior member’s career development, to introduce new perspectives, or to accelerate the roadmap in one or more areas?
- Does the team have a roadmap containing low weight issues with few dependencies suitable for an intern?
- Will the Data program at GitLab benefit from the intern bringing data experience back to their full-time role/department?
- Mentor Commitment
- Do the mentors have previous experience mentoring interns or junior engineers? Previous experience is a nice-to-have, but not a must-have.
- Can the mentor commit to a 3-month engagement, including regular meetings and progress reviews? Are there potentially extended out-of-office periods that would affect the internship experience?
- Intern Commitment
- Can the intern commit to a 3-month engagement, including regular meetings and progress reviews? Are there potentially extended out-of-office periods that would affect the internship experience?
- Does the intern have sufficient foundational skills to be able to ramp up to work on a Data project? While interns are not expected to be heavily skilled in the area they are interested in (they will build those skills up as part of the internship program!) they should have a working knowledge/awareness of the tooling and technology that is required to successfully complete an internship.
If the answer to these questions is YES, there is a great chance the internship is a fit for all team members. In other cases, internship requests may be deferred to a future quarter (based on bandwidth/availability of projects) or declined (if there is not a good fit).
Data Team Internship KPIs
The following KPIs are guidelines we plan to use for the internship. These may be adjusted by the mentor/intern prior to the start of the internship with approval from the team manager.
- Successful Data Team Onboarding within 30 Calendar Days
- Monthly Progress Report and Feedback issue
- Final CSAT Score of 4 or higher on a 5 point scale
- Number of Data Project MRs successfully Merged > 5
- Number of Data Team Handbook MRs successfully Merged > 5
What Does A Data Team Intern Do?
An internship gives you insight into a Data Team role by providing you opportunities to learn and contribute to GitLab results. You will be fully integrated into the team through Data Onboarding and be assigned real projects that contribute to Quarterly Objectives and the Data Team Roadmap. In the GitLab Data Team we believe in full end-to-end ownership of the work we do, ranging from requirements gathering all the way to production deployment and operations. During your internship you will be assigned a Senior team member as a mentor-manager, who will help you to navigate in daily tasks. Examples of your tasks will include:
- Requirements gathering
- Extraction of data from various sources to support project’s objective
- Analysing and visualising data to develop new insights
- Collaboration with stakeholders (including explaining technical concepts with non-technical language)
- Working in GitLab to manage projects (via epics and issues)
- Writing new source code and merging the code through a Merge Request
General Requirements
- Familiarity with and interest in the specified Data Team job family
- BS or MS in data-related fields (statistics, computer science, engineering), but self-learners are also welcome to apply
- Positive and solution-oriented mindset
- Comfort working in a highly agile, intensely iterative environment
- Self-motivated and self-managing, with task organizational skills
- Working knowledge of, or demonstrated hands-on interest and propensity for learning SQL
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