Basecamp is looking for talented interns to join our team this summer. We’re excited to work with you, and the things you work on will impact millions of users at the world’s leading online project management tool.
About the Basecamp summer internship program
Interns at Basecamp work on real projects and are mentored one-on-one by a member of our team who will guide you throughout your time at Basecamp. The projects you’ll work on as an intern at Basecamp are all derived from real problems we face as a business, and we expect you’ll have a meaningful impact during your time here. You’ll leave Basecamp with new technical, creative, and business skills and having accomplished something significant.
Internships at Basecamp are remote — you can work from anywhere you want, provided there’s some overlap in time zones with your assigned mentor. We’ll fly you to Chicago once or twice during the summer to get together with your mentor and the rest of the intern class, and you’ll talk regularly with your mentor via phone, Skype, or Google Hangouts. You’ll also participate in some of our dozens of Campfire chat rooms every day.
All internships are paid and require a commitment of 8–12 weeks of full time work between May and August 2016 (we’re flexible on start/end dates, planned vacations, etc.).
About you
We’re hiring interns interested in working on programming, product design, operations, marketing, and data.
Regardless of role, there are a few key things we’re looking for in interns:
- You are independent and self-driven. Basecamp is built on the concept of being a team of managers of one, and that applies to interns as well. You’ll get plenty of support and guidance from your mentor and the rest of the team, but no one will be telling you how to spend each minute of your day, so it’ll be up to you to make sure you’re making forward progress.
- You are an excellent communicator. We write a lot at Basecamp — we write for our products, we write for our marketing sites and initiatives, and most importantly, we write as our primary way of communicating internally. Clear and effective communication is essential to being successful at Basecamp.
- You have fresh ideas and you’re willing to share them. We don’t know it all, and we actively want to hear fresh ideas and perspectives that we haven’t considered.
- You’re eager to learn. You’ll dive right in to new technologies, new approaches, and new concepts and apply them to your work.
How to apply
To apply, send an email to [email protected] explaining why you want to be an intern at Basecamp, what projects you’re interested in working on (see below), what work you’ve done in the past, and why we should hire you. Feel free to include your resume, but we’re big fans of great cover letters over resumes. Be sure to tell us what dates you’re available this summer and where you’ll be located.
We’ll be accepting applications through Wednesday, February 24th. We’ll be in touch to confirm receipt of your application and let you know about next steps shortly after we receive your email.
The projects
As an intern at Basecamp, you’ll work on one of the following projects directly with a mentor.
- Programming: Research and implement new features for Trix, our open-source rich text editor (JavaScript / CoffeeScript) and integrate those features in Basecamp 3.
- Programming: Make our Android app more Androidy. Taking into consideration the foundation of our hybrid (web + native) app development philosophy, our Android team will help you explore ways to make uniquely powerful Android features — ones that make our customers reach for their Android device instead of the desktop app.
- Programming: Change the way people find information internally at Basecamp by unifying various internal search tools into a single source of all the information people need to respond to customer problems. You’ll talk to internal clients, survey the state of the world, and then build out a solution.
- Design: Understand how people work with clients in Basecamp through a mix of quantitative analysis and customer research (surveys, structured interviews). You’ll work to structure the problem, identify the data that you need, write survey questions and interview guides, conduct interviews, and synthesize findings and implications for client features within Basecamp.
- Marketing: Help us target a specific industry (or “vertical”) by picking an industry, identifying the various stakeholders who are involved, interviewing them, and building out a sample Basecamp to demonstrate how Basecamp can help them accomplish their work. You’ll launch your work and then measure the impact of that work on the targeted vertical.
- Marketing: Identify what people are saying about us on social media by using your analytical and digital marketing skills to help determine both quantitative and qualitative ways for us to know what people are saying about Basecamp. Are they generally happy? Satisfied? What are they talking about? How can we measure our impact?
- Operations: Bring us into the IPv6 age by coming up with a plan for us to add IPv6 support to our public sites, testing support, deploying the new configuration, and providing documentation and training for our operations and support teams.
- Operations: Establish a way of offering custom domains for Basecamp 3 customers. You’ll figure out how to automate provisioning, handle terminating thousands of SSL certificates, monitor for problems, and make it a great customer experience.
- Operations: Upgrade our hardware provisioning process so we have a fully automated process to take a server from the point of arriving at our datacenter to being production ready.
- Operations: Make it easy for new people to come on board or set up a new computer by figuring out how to run everything you need for development in a virtual machine or container.
- Data: Help us find problems before we feel the pain of them by improving our ability to identify unusual values in the over 30,000 services we monitor to tell us about the health of our applications and businesses. You’ll identify the right algorithms to use to detect aberrations, the parameters needed to ensure that we balance false positive and false negative alert rates, and put the system into production.
