Life at Endowus as a Mobile Engineering Intern

Hello! I’m Amelia Tay, a third-year undergraduate studying Information Systems at the Singapore Management University and I’ve spent my past 5 months with Endowus as a mobile engineering intern. Taking my last week here to reflect on these past few months has made me realise how pivotal of a role Endowus has played in my personal growth. So here I am, hoping to share with you how that came to be!

Interning at Endowus

At Endowus, the development teams mainly function by domains. For example, a team comprising of engineers, product managers, and product designers will be working together to improve our onboarding experience for new clients, focusing solely on that set of sign-up & onboarding related client journeys. Personally, I worked with the team that focuses on engaging already-invested clients, to educate & encourage them to invest more, in the right products for the right goals.

Having previously interned at multiple companies, there were a few aspects of this particular internship with Endowus that I found uniquely beneficial, summarised into the following 3 key headers.

They will involve you just as they would for a full-timer.

You get to make an impact. You get to see your work published. And you get to go through the motion of being an engineer.

The team at Endowus treats you like a full-timer. This means involving you in sprint meetings, assigning engineering tasks to you, and encouraging you to be involved in discussions for feature implementations. Some things I’ve managed to accomplish in my time here include:

• Implement in-app notifications, inclusive of coding the filter logic and state management of Flutter widgets.
• Independently lead the development of an epic, working with product, design, and CX to refine requirements, investigate implementation possibilities, and deliver the features to our production app.
• Lead company-wide demonstrations of shipped features & newly-adopted tools.

In the process of striving to independently complete tasks, I gained a lot of experience learning about concepts like BLoC architecture and deep links, best coding practices in Flutter and utilising devtools to optimise my work, automating tests for good coverage, using a vast range of tools like Charles, Bitrise, and CircleCI, as well as working with other stakeholders to turn requirements into reality.

And the most assuring part about the process was the fact that I could always fall back on my team and get near-instant replies to my Slack messages whenever I ran into major roadblocks or wanted a second pair of eyes to quality-check my work.

They will show you what it’s like to own and scale a product.

You get to observe a product grow under the care of outstanding engineers and forward-looking product people.

There’s a lot that goes into building a good, secure, and scalable digital product beyond ensuring the product has a product market fit. At times, you might join teams that aren’t as involved in the process of building a good product - They just build to provided specifications. Fortunately, one inspiring thing about the engineers here is their commitment to being proactive engineers who continuously consider extended impact, system design, scalable architectures, and possible adoption of promising technologies while striving to achieve the business objectives laid out by our product managers.

Given the phase Endowus is currently at in terms of scale & growth, you get to bear witness to this process for multiple iterations. From receiving requirements, to spending time devising an optimal implementation approach together with various stakeholders, to seeing it launched in public for all our clients to experience. Listening to the discussions fuelled my interest in engineering - Who knew engineering wasn’t all about coding, but more about problem-solving, bouncing ideas, and getting amazed at the smart minds all around you.

They will take a chance on you

You get a chance to try.

I personally feel that the team at Endowus makes it a point to give people a chance. You could come from a biology background but still have a shot at an engineering role with the right skills demonstrated. You could have no experience with mobile technology but still be assigned a mobile feature task if you ask for it. And you could be an intern but still ask the c-suite out for a coffee and they would be happy to give you time out of their busy schedules.

In some sense, I believe that as long as you approach the team with the right attitude, you will get a chance to try anything you want (within their means, of course)! While this pointer might not resonate so deeply with everyone, I’ve been immensely grateful for this period of growth and learning, so in my eyes, this characteristic of the team deserves a section.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, I got to see and experience quite a bit at Endowus! More importantly, my time here made me realise what I lacked and gave me a direction to work towards in the future. In summary:

• Go deeper & really understand what I’m implementing: Being results-obsessed, I cared more about the end result rather than appreciating the process and nuances of every line of code that I wrote. In the long-run, I can tell how this ignorance will eventually hold me back.
• Go beyond picking up simpler tasks: My lack of confidence in my abilities drove me to push more complex tasks to my full-timer colleagues. Looking back, those were the best opportunities to upskill.
• Reach out to more people: Especially when people are more willing to entertain you when you’re an intern! Take this golden chance to hear about more experiences and form more connections.

Fellow interns reading this, if you resonate with any of these pointers, take this as a sign to just do it!

As I navigate the remainder of my schooling days and prepare to enter the working world, I’m keen to act on my identified weaknesses and grow into an engineer or product person capable of bringing value to a product I’m passionate about - And Endowus has played a big role in fuelling my motivation.