A summer of shipping: Inside Cloudflare’s 2023 intern program

Cloudflare’s 2023 summer internship program brought together roughly 40 interns from five countries, working both remotely and in person across the company’s global offices. The cohort spanned engineering, product management, internal auditing, and marketing. Here’s a look at what the Intern-ets—as they were dubbed after a company-wide vote—actually built and experienced.

From research to production: What the interns shipped

Interns were given ownership over projects with real customer impact, ranging from new product features to internal workflow automation.

  • Mia M., Product Manager, worked on requirements for the Cloudflare Secrets Store, a new product for storing, encrypting, and deploying sensitive data across Cloudflare’s product suite. Her focus was on the core platform and the first milestone: moving secrets and environment variables from the per-Worker level to the account level.
  • Pierre, Research, worked on integrating differential privacy into distributed aggregation protocols. The goal was to add formal privacy guarantees for protocols commonly used to collect sensitive data like browser telemetry or health information.
  • Johnny, Software Engineer, built Object-Level Access Policies for API Shield, a first step toward addressing Broken Object-Level Authorization, which OWASP ranks as the #1 API security risk. The feature lets customers define explicit allowlists and blocklists for API traffic per object.
  • Olivia, Project Manager, led the Dissatisfied (DSAT) Customer Outreach Project and JIRA Automations for Customer Support. The DSAT project reaches out to premium customers who reported dissatisfaction, offering personalized contact; the JIRA work targets zero-touch tickets that remove support as an intermediary.

Several engineering interns also shipped features that were covered in their own blog posts: Emilie added a debugging feature for Cloudflare Queues, Joaquin built a new Workers Database integration with Upstash, and Austin created scheduled deletion for Cloudflare Stream.

Remote, in-office, and everywhere in between

The intern experience varied by location. In Austin, Jada appreciated colleagues who were “warm and open to exploring the city,” while Anni and Maximo attended an Austin-based team summit. In San Francisco, Emmanuel F. valued team lunches, Matthew worked from the rooftop with a city skyline view, and Jonathan liked the hybrid work model. Remote interns like Johnny praised the company’s distributed and flexible work style. Daniël noted that several coworkers spotted the Feynman Lectures on Physics on his shelf at home and asked about them. Remote intern socials on GatherRound were a hit, with Emmanuel G., Aaron, and Feiyu describing them as “a fun, quick way to get to meet everyone”; Pradyumna particularly enjoyed a session of skribbl.io.

Mentorship made a difference

Interns frequently cited their mentors as key to the experience. Aaron said his conversations with mentor Harshal left him knowing more than when he started. Harshini credited Revathy for helping her learn “the best way possible to do something and ultimately achieve my goals.” Anni admired manager Nevi for investing in intern growth. Jonathan relied on Conner for engineering tips and NeoVim guidance, and Jada looked up to Malgorzata for being welcoming, knowledgeable, and supportive.

Conversations with leadership

Executive fireside chats gave interns direct access to Cloudflare’s leadership. Shaheen took away CTO John Graham-Cumming's humility and emphasis on daily learning. Emilie valued General Counsel Doug Kramer's advice on identifying a career "north star" while staying open to "exit-ramps." Yunfan enjoyed hearing co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince recount Cloudflare’s startup origins, and Harsh and Mia C. learned from COO Michelle Zatlyn about moving across the country to start the company, which began as a business school project.

Small moments, lasting impressions

The cohort bonded over shared snacks. A July virtual snack break sent boxes of Indonesian treats to interns; on-site interns favored office staples like pita chips, Lucky Charms, chocolate almonds, coconut chocolate bars, and coconut water. Both the Austin and San Francisco offices even have Sour Patch Kids dispensers.

Interns also reported being surprised by the level of trust and visibility they received. Simon, Emmanuel F., and Maximo were struck by doing “such visible and important work as an intern.” Austin noted he was “treated like any other member of the team,” and Harshini heard colleagues say, “that is really cool, I can't wait to see that happen—we need it.” Eames appreciated that colleagues cared about his well-being, not just his output. Johnny, coming from academia, was amazed by the effort put into productionizing what he had only seen in research.