Another summer in the books! Every year, Plaid opens its doors to a new class of curious, driven, and wildly talented interns—our Plinterns—to work across engineering & new business sales. This year, our 2026 Plinterns brought fresh energy from campuses across the country, diving into projects that stretch the edges of fintech, from building with AI-native tools to shaping go-to-market plays for new markets.

Whether they were posted up in our San Francisco or New York offices, debugging production issues, pitching in on customer demos, or grabbing dinner with the team after a long day, our interns left their mark on the people and products that power Plaid.

We caught up with a few Plinterns to hear what they built, learned, and loved this summer.

Brooke Li

Duke University 2027

Team: Layer

What tools, languages, or parts of the stack did you get to work with?

My projects involved improvements to Layer. With the help of Claude and Codex, I worked on end to end development across the full stack and even got to touch Ruby for the first time. In addition to building features, I also used tools such as Plogger and Chronosphere for observability and metrics purposes.

What did a typical day or week look like for you?

I tried to go into the office every day this summer. Besides weekly Monday check-ins with my mentor, I usually took time to merge or edit PRs and organize Linear tickets before daily team standup at 11 AM. After that came team lunch, which I always looked forward to. Other than the occasional meeting, my afternoons were usually reserved for focused work sessions, where I’d continue coding, discuss engineering decisions, and iterate on my implementation. I’d also take breaks to walk outside or grab coffee with my intern buddy cohort. At 6 PM, the rest of the interns and I headed to dinner in the cafe before calling it a day.

How did you approach a technical challenge you ran into?

One of my biggest technical challenges involved working with another team’s infrastructure, which required a lot of cross team communication. Through several discussions, we ultimately decided to create a new database to provide the information I needed for the Layer stack. For the rest of my internship, I also regularly worked with the other team’s on-call engineer to coordinate the necessary changes and operational work to support my project. 

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

Traveling to San Diego for the Fraud offsite, playing card games after dinner with the other interns, watching The Odyssey with my team, successfully solving an escape room, seeing Maybe Happy Ending on Broadway… I have too many to count. This summer was so much fun thanks to the people I spent it with, and I’ll remember these memories for a long time.

Khang Nguyen

York University 2027

Team: Credit

What did a typical day or week look like for you?

Every day at Plaid felt like a perfect Summer day for me. I usually wake up very early in the morning so by 8:30 I was already in the office munching on the office breakfast (LOVED the lox and cream cheese bagel). The morning was where I reserved time mostly for deep focus work: submitting PRs, reviewing code... Then lunch came, and with it came my team’s tradition of post-lunch coffee runs. The afternoon was mostly spent gaining alignments in meetings, 1-1s, and stand-ups. By 5, we started wrapping up our work and either enjoyed the amazing office dinners, or went for a fun intern event, be it a Broadway show, or a Yankees game.

How did your team support your growth this summer?

I don’t think I could have asked for a better team! I had an awesome time working with Plaids who have always gone above and beyond in answering my questions, constructively reviewing my codes, and pairing with me on hard problems. I still remember how one of my questions turned into a 45-minute 1-on-1 session with my mentor which helped me understand my team’s system on a much deeper level.

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

My favorite memory was when all the interns went escape-rooming. It was an absolute blast collaborating with one another to solve problems while having a ton of fun doing so. I personally love how each of us contributed differently to the puzzles in the room. It was great seeing the amazing problem solving abilities of all the interns outside of work context.

How did you approach a technical challenge you ran into?

During my internship, one of the most interesting technical challenges I ran into was determining which algorithm I should go with for a graph colouring problem (basically finding minimum groups needed for grouping a list of products). I started it out by analysing the big O of the algorithms, time and space, before telling Claude to quickly code up a benchmark for both approaches. Once I wrapped up the analysis, I checked in with my mentor and we agreed on going with the greedy algorithm.

Alex Oh

University of Waterloo 2027

Team: ML Infrastructure

What did you build or ship this summer?

My project this summer was exploring a new way to serve our ML inference workloads with the goal of improving reliability while lowering costs. It was a great opportunity to explore architectural decisions I had not considered before, from model packaging strategies to deployment configurations. I learned how seemingly small infrastructure decisions can have a significant impact on the latency, cost, and performance of a system.

What's a technical skill you feel more confident in now than at the start of the summer?

I feel much more confident in my ability to quickly gain context when approaching unfamiliar problems. Plaid’s extensive AI tooling made it easy to ramp up on relevant information, whether that meant locating documentation, finding a specific part of the codebase, or tracking down a previous discussion thread. I felt comfortable jumping across different layers of the stack and independently figuring out how different parts of the system fit together. 

How did your team support your growth this summer?

My team was extremely supportive throughout the summer and played a big role in my growth as an engineer. I had regular conversations about technical decisions, formal design reviews for my project, and plenty of opportunities to get feedback on my work. I appreciated being able to ask my team for a second opinion or talk through my findings with them.

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

Of all the great memories from the summer - watching the Yankees vs Dodgers, playing flag football at Prospect Park, going on a Pizza crawl, etc - my favourite memory was flying out to Santa Cruz for an offsite and meeting the rest of my team in person. It was great having all of the people from the Data org in one place and getting to hear about what everyone was working on.

Samuel Lukas

University of Toronto 2027

Team: Data Foundations & AI

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

One of my favorite memories this summer was being able to travel to Santa Cruz for a summer offsite. It was really fun to hang out with teammates and other interns and to meet people from different parts of the org. I remember screaming at the top of my lungs on rollercoasters and playing different games on the boardwalk which was really fun.

What made this internship different from others you’ve had?

What stood out to me was the amount of autonomy and decision making they gave us. It was really motivating to be able to suggest new and novel solutions to problems, and to be able to iterate and work through these solutions with guidance and advice from really smart people. Being able to have big ambitions, ship fast, and see results first hand was really exciting.

What tools, languages, or parts of the stack did you get to work with?

My project over the summer was to speed up inference latency for Plaid's sequential foundation model. To accomplish this, I got to work closely with the machine learning stack, picking up different runtime optimization frameworks like ONNX and TensorRT, while also implementing techniques based in academic research like knowledge distillation.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to next year's interns?

Be curious! Say hi to that person sitting next to you during lunch, play a quick round of ping pong with a teammate, ask questions to your mentor and manager. It really helps to want to learn more about Plaid and the people who make it such an amazing place.

Jason Mo

Georgia Tech 2027

Team: Account Verification

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

This is a hard question to answer, so I’ll just list some of my favorite memories from the summer. Biking around Santa Cruz with my team, being in NYC for the Knicks and World Cup, go-karting, random walks and coffee runs, escape room, karaoke with the Plinterns, and probably a dozen other events I’m forgetting. 

What did you build or ship this summer?

I helped launch Database Auth in Canada by enabling self-service configuration in the Plaid Dashboard. Clients in Canada can now enable Database Auth without having to contact an account manager. I also built a new public endpoint, /identity/match/list, that gives clients direct access to their historical Identity Match attempts and helps them meet compliance requirements.

What project or call made you feel like a real contributor?

I remember checking the logs one day and seeing that there was an actual customer using my project. This really surprised me as we had only just updated the public docs for my project and it was super cool to see the impact and that people were already experimenting with it.  

What's a technical skill you feel more confident in now than at the start of the summer?

I've become much more proficient with AI-assisted development during my internship. AI is rapidly transforming the industry, and Plaid gave me both the resources and the confidence to experiment with different AI tools while learning how to use them responsibly as an engineer. Throughout the summer, I developed a number of effective workflows using tools like Claude and Codex, which have made me significantly more productive and changed the way I approach development.

Devang Sharma

UCLA 2027 

Team: Data Infrastructure

What made you want to intern at Plaid?

This summer I was looking forward to working somewhere that has a startup-y culture, yet the scale of a big tech company, and Plaid was the perfect blend of both. After talking to a few previous interns and full timers throughout the interview process, I was told that the culture at Plaid was deeply rooted in valuing and investing back into their employees. And this was very apparent throughout the summer. My mentors and teammates were very supportive throughout the summer and gave me real responsibilities, so my work and efforts felt valued at the company.  

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

My favorite memory from the summer was the shoe painting event. All the interns got to pick out a pair of white sneakers and customize them with different painting materials. We spent a few hours painting, talking, and seeing everyone’s designs come together. It was a really fun and relaxed way to socialize with the other interns!

How did you approach a technical challenge you ran into?

My approach to technical challenges evolved throughout the summer. Early on, I tended to dive straight into implementation without fully documenting the problem or considering different solutions. Over time, I became more proactive about thinking through alternatives, writing down my approach, and asking questions before committing to a solution. This helped me work more efficiently and make better technical decisions.

Claire Luo

Duke University 2027

Team: Network Enablement and Access

How did your team support your growth this summer?

I valued how collaborative my team was, especially in talking through technical decisions or whiteboarding different approaches. They were always accessible to give feedback and guidance. At the same time, I owned my project end to end, from the problem to the spec to the build; I feel like that mix of ownership and support that my team provided enabled me to grow this summer.

What’s your favorite memory from the summer?

There are too many to name! My favorite memories are all of the intern and team outings – escape rooms, trying NYC food spots near the office (pizza crawl!), watching a broadway show, karaoke, and so much more.

What new tools, frameworks, or ideas did you pick up this summer?

One of the biggest things I picked up this summer was how to design frameworks for evaluating LLM-driven systems, which was a core idea of my capstone project. Unlike traditional software, LLMs are non-deterministic, so testing isn’t as simple as pass or fail. I learned how to evaluate performance across different outputs, measure reliability, and implement a proactive approach to catching regressions.

What's a technical skill you feel more confident in now than at the start of the summer?

I feel more confident in AI-driven software development and using LLMs to streamline my engineering workflows. For example, I created an AI skill to automate a tedious manual workflow for engineers. Plaid is very AI-forward and through my internship, I developed better practices for using AI to quickly build context around large codebases and documentation, and then build effectively on top of that understanding. 

Datta Kansal

Georgia Tech 2027

Team: Data Payments

How would you describe Plaid's culture in a few words?

I would describe Plaid’s culture as one big family. Despite Plaid growing rapidly, it very much feels like one big family in the office. Whether it’s playing random board games during lunch, eating dinner together, or going on random sidequests or popups in and around the office, Plaid does a great job at making everyone feel included and welcomed at work. Additionally, despite its size, Plaid very much feels like a startup, as every team moves at incredible velocity when compared to companies of similar size.

What's a technical skill you feel more confident in now than at the start of the summer?

Plaid does a great job at providing access to state-of-the-art AI tools, whether it’s for coding, code reviews, or their own internal developer tools, which has allowed me to become a better user of AI. Everyone assumes college students have the best AI workflows, but often lack access to the highest-tier plans and are juggling lower-tier plans. This summer, I was able to create my own AI workflow and understand the pain points with coding with AI, such as redundancy and verbosity, which has made me more conscious about how I work and code with AI as the entire industry moves towards coding agents.

What made this internship different from others you’ve had?

There are two things that made this internship different from others. Technically speaking, Plaid gave their interns a lot of liberty on their projects. We were essentially given a one-liner problem statement and given the opportunity to design a solution and build it, which is rare to see from a company as big as Plaid. Socially speaking, Plaid really supports its interns. Whether it’s weekly social events or intern check-ins, Plaid makes every intern feel at home for the summer.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to next year's interns?

I would recommend getting close to your fellow interns through events. This summer, all the interns had a blast through events planned by Plaid, which led to us hosting our own events towards the end, which was very fun! I’d also recommend chatting with engineers and managers across the company in areas you’re interested in, because everyone (even the leaders) is always open to chat, especially with interns. Finally, I would recommend using all the industry AI tools Plaid provides you, as it’s a great way to see where technology is headed today.

Sasha Murray

UC Berkeley 2027

Team: Update Pipeline

What was it like working with your engineering team?

My team does not have daily stand-ups, which was different from the other internships I have done. Instead, we use that time for more focused one-on-one or small-group meetings about the projects we are working on together. I liked this structure because it gave me more time to discuss technical decisions in detail and get feedback from the engineers who had the most relevant context. My projects also involved working with teams outside Update Pipeline, so these smaller meetings were useful for discussing architecture, risk, and rollout plans with the right people.

What's a technical skill you feel more confident in now than at the start of the summer?

I feel much more confident using LLMs for software development. Plaid is very AI-forward, and engineers are encouraged to experiment with different tools and incorporate them into their workflows. During my experimentation, I created a skill that gathers trace data from Chronosphere and uses an agent to identify the operations contributing the most latency. This made it easier to find bottlenecks in complex code paths and turn the analysis into concrete optimization proposals. 

What's a moment that made you feel part of the team?

I felt like part of the team when I identified opportunities to simplify the systems Plaid uses to create and manage a user’s bank connection After finishing my main capstone project, I used the extra time to learn more about how Plaid securely stores login information, creates bank connections, and helps returning users reconnect without repeating unnecessary steps. As I became more familiar with this process, I found areas where the architecture could be simpler and where responsibilities between services could be clearer. I discussed these ideas with engineers across the team and learned more about their technical and product implications. Some of the improvements I proposed are now planned for later this year, which made me feel that I was contributing to the team’s longer-term direction rather than only completing my assigned work.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to next year's interns?

Take the opportunity to meet people across the company. The people at Plaid are incredible, and I learned a lot from conversations with engineers outside my immediate team. I would also recommend taking initiative beyond the initial scope of your project and being present during team meetings, even when the topic does not directly relate to your work. Those discussions provide useful context about how technical and product decisions are made, and they can help you find other areas where you can contribute.

Filip Icev 

University of Michigan 2027

Team: Developer Efficiency

What made you want to intern at Plaid?

I was first drawn to Plaid because of its mission and the unique role it plays in the financial ecosystem. Plaid solves genuinely interesting technical problems that make people’s lives better. Beyond that, throughout the interview process and my conversations with employees, I found a culture full of technically excellent people who were deeply curious and focused on making an impact. Overall, it seemed like an incredible place to contribute and grow technically. 

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to next year’s interns?

Take the time to really understand, at a high level, what your team and the broader company do. A lot of the most valuable learning comes from understanding the different projects happening across your team and Plaid, how they fit together, and how they contribute to Plaid’s mission and business goals. Even if you are focused on one or two specific projects, having that broader context will make you a much stronger Plintern and member of Plaid. 

What did you build or ship this summer?

My main project was a weekly service that reviewed engineering documentation across every team each week. It identified the five highest-impact documents that were out of date, prioritizing those most heavily viewed by other teams. I then used Plaid’s internally hosted agent, Hamilton, along with a multi-agent workflow to research our codebase, Slack, and other internal sources. From that research, the system generated an updated version of the document. Through an internal webpage, engineers could easily review what had changed between the original and updated versions and choose whether to apply the changes.

How did your team support your growth this summer?

When I expressed that one of my biggest goals was to grow into an excellent software engineer, my manager and mentor really helped me work toward that. They consistently gave me more ownership over my projects and put me in situations with the kind of scope, ambiguity, and responsibility that more senior engineers might deal with. Their feedback, trust, and willingness to challenge me played a big role in how much I grew over the summer. 

Meha Selva

UC Irvine 2027

Team: Credit Products

What's a technical skill you feel more confident in now than at the start of the summer?

This summer, I became much more confident using AI agents to make myself a better engineer. Plaid is very AI-forward while maintaining a high bar for code quality and technical understanding. As I experimented with different tools and prompting styles, I also became better at reviewing, questioning, and understanding code I hadn’t written myself. Managing multiple agents and workstreams also strengthened my ability to plan ahead, prioritize, and switch between technical contexts.

How did your team support your growth this summer?

My team consistently encouraged me to act as an owner. I made many of the key decisions for my project: writing a full technical spec, presenting it for review, organizing and leading cross-functional meetings, and communicating with our go-to-market partners. That ownership extended beyond my capstone project. I was also trusted to investigate pages and alerts involving our CRA PDF services during the team’s on-call rotation. My teammates never dismissed my ideas because I was “just an intern.” Instead, they treated me as a trusted contributor and a go-to person with meaningful product knowledge.

What project or call made you feel like a real contributor?

As part of my capstone project, I organized a meeting with Product and Design to align on its scope and requirements. The questions and considerations I raised during that conversation surfaced an opportunity beyond my immediate project and ultimately led to a one-pager for a future team initiative. It was rewarding to see that my contributions could shape not only the project I was building, but also future work at Plaid.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to next year's interns?

Working at Plaid is about much more than the code you write or the products you build. The people here were a huge part of what made my summer so enjoyable. My advice is to take every opportunity to meet people across the company whether through coffee chats, board games over lunch or dinner, or social events. There is so much to learn from the people at Plaid, both professionally and personally, and those relationships can become one of the most valuable parts of the internship.

Victoria Yu

Cornell University 2027

Team: Network Enablement

What did you build or ship this summer?

For my capstone, I ran an exploratory project to answer whether sequence embeddings from a fraud-focused transformer model could improve my team's retention prediction XGBoost model. I built the full pipeline end-to-end: bridging the two models' different data grains and generating, joining, and evaluating the impact of the embeddings. For my starter, I refactored the pipeline behind the active apps count metric, leading to a ~12x reduction in partition writes per partner-onboarding event.

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

I really enjoyed the scent-blending event! It was fun to sample various different scents and see what the other interns created as well. Heytea was the go-to for our intern boba runs, so I made a small candle and room spray with a white tea, grapefruit, yuzu, and mango mix. They both live on my desk and visitors always have fun guessing what the scent is!

What's one piece of advice you'd give to next year's interns?

Don't be afraid to ask for help from others beyond your mentor and manager; Plaids are very kind and generous with sharing their knowledge! I collaborated closely with an ML engineer on the fraud-focused team on understanding model architecture and training, with an ML engineer and SWEs on my own team on evaluation and infrastructure, and with legal on data-usage constraints.

How would you describe Plaid's culture in a few words?

High trust, inspiring, and tight-knit (both within the intern community and overall)!

Eric Yoon

Yale 2027

Team: CGX → Customer Foundations

What tools, languages, or parts of the stack did you get to work with?

The SWE internship experience—and the tools we use every day—have changed so much since Summer 2025! Having Claude or Codex make line-by-line changes has freed me up to focus on making larger, more meaningful architectural decisions. Plaid has been awesome in keeping us up to date with the latest tooling, with workshops ranging from long-running workflows to token efficiency.

What did you build or ship this summer?

My intern project was very infra-heavy—think orchestrating distributed cloud workers. I definitely felt challenged having to think about many different considerations such as cost, latency, and workload. Being able to work with low-level infrastructure configuration was a new experience for me, and I definitely learned a lot!

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

My favorite intern event was when we all went out to Karaoke in Japantown. We re-lived our childhood and teen years by singing 2010s hits! Overall, I'm so glad the interns came together and got to know each other over the course of the summer.

What project or call made you feel like a real contributor?

One of Plaid's principles implores software engineers to "act as owners," and I really felt that the intern program allowed us to exercise the skill of taking a project end-to-end. I was responsible for drafting a design doc, implementing my project on a code-level, and monitoring rollout; if something were to go wrong, I would be the technical point of contact, as I would be the most knowledgeable person on the feature I built out!

Sreekara Dandibhotla

Georgia Tech 2027

Team: Link Foundations

What project or call made you feel like a real contributor?

Part of my capstone project involved running an experiment to measure the conversion impact of a security fix I designed. I worked with my team to monitor the rollout and track key metrics, and collaborated with other teams to make sure our experiment wouldn't conflict with theirs. It was rewarding to see the security fix working on my phone.

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

There were so many fun events like sneaker painting, topgolf, and random coffee runs. My favorite memory from this summer was the truffle making event. We got to try chocolate from different parts of the world and make our own truffles and ganache!

What's one piece of advice you'd give to next year's interns?

The biggest piece of advice I'd give to next year's interns is to take this opportunity to schedule coffee chats with engineers inside and, especially, outside your team. During the internship it's very easy to get tunnel vision and focus entirely on your project, but some of the most valuable things I learned came from conversations with people working on completely different things. Reaching out helped me learn more about other parts of the business, see the problems other teams are facing, and better understand where my own work fits into the bigger picture.

How did your team support your growth this summer?

Before the internship started, I told my mentor about the kind of work I wanted to be a part of, and he and my manager kept that in mind when scoping out my intern project. This really set me up for success from the beginning. That support continued throughout the summer. Everyone at Plaid was incredibly open to helping or answering any questions. They were always willing to make time to chat or hop on a call to work through more complicated things. Early on, one of my teammates even spent a couple of hours walking me through our entire service at a high level, including how we integrate with other teams, without me even asking. Throughout my internship, I saw that same willingness to collaborate and help others reflected in everyone I worked with at Plaid.

Miranda Coe

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill  2027

What made you want to intern at Plaid?
Plaid is a dynamic and innovative company! They are constantly looking to improve business functions and entering new verticals; never scared of taking calculated risks. Interning at a company that is looking to change and grow in a sustainable way and truly cares about their employees is exactly what I was looking for in a learning opportunity! 

What's your favorite memory from the summer?

My favorite Plintern memory was our Carolina Tiger Rescue volunteer event. We got to explore the grounds and see all the unique cats that the rescue houses. We also got to participate in building a fence for one of the new habitats and this fostered team building between my fellow interns and I! 

What's something you learned about communicating value or telling a story with data?

People trust results over promises! If you can build credibility with real customer stories and statistics, people will be able to visualize the value Plaid can add to their business. Many business owners are strapped for time, but they will always appreciate how Plaid can help them reach their goals! 

What skill from this internship do you think will help you most in your career?

Communication is key in any opportunity that comes your way! Your personal brand is built on how you respond and engage with your peers and colleagues. It is important to always be respectfully confident and communicative when in any career related position and this is a muscle I have been flexing all summer long! 

Keya Mehta

Cal Poly SLO 2027 

What project or call made you feel like a real contributor?

Throughout the internship we were given so much hands on experience. Every day I had the opportunity to work with real potential customers and actually contribute to the business. One experience that really stood out was bringing three prospects from recycled leads all the way to meetings with an NBA, then an Account Executive, and eventually to accepted opportunities! Seeing something I worked on from the very beginning turn into a real opportunity was awesome.

What's something you learned that surprised you?

I was surprised by how much my own knowledge grew just from speaking with prospects! Having conversations with founders and people in leadership positions at their companies exposed me to so many different businesses, industries, and ideas. Every conversation taught me something new, not only about Plaid and fintech but about how companies operate, the problems they're trying to solve, and how they think about growth.

How did your team support your growth this summer?

Every individual at Plaid, even outside of the New Business team felt like part of my team. I always felt like I could go to anyone in the office with a question and everyone genuinely wanted to see me succeed. In addition to having an awesome mentor and manager, I had the opportunity to do mock calls with people across different offices, shadow calls, and set up coffee chats with people across Plaid. Having so many people willing to take time out of their day to help me grow made a huge difference throughout my internship.

What skill from this internship do you think will help you most in your career?

Everything!!! As bad of an answer as that might be, there’s a reason people say sales is such a great place to start your career. This internship has completely changed the way I communicate and understand other people. I’ve realized that sales is really everywhere. Whether you’re an engineer getting your manager to believe in your idea or a CEO getting people to believe in your vision, you’re always selling something. Learning how to understand what matters to someone and get them excited about an idea is a skill I know I’ll carry with me throughout my career.

Maz Reeder

Cal Poly SLO 2027 

How did your team support your growth this summer?

I am very grateful for the NBA team here in Raleigh and across the whole company, because they did a lot to support my growth. My mentor and other NBA’s took time out of their day to teach me valuable lessons and let me practice things like calls. Aside from constant helpful advice, mock calls were one of the best ways for me to grow. NBA’s were nice enough to do these call roleplays with me weekly, greatly improving my abilities. Once I had done enough mock calls and was call certified, NBA’s let me lead discovery calls with real prospects. As a Cal Poly student, I am a huge believer in “learn by doing”, so being able to lead real sales calls was massive for my growth. 

What did a typical day on the sales team look like?

As interns, our day looks a bit different than full time NBAs on the sales team, but there are definitely some similarities. We start the day reaching out to individuals and businesses interested in learning more about Plaid! Since every customer uses Plaid differently, each message takes a bit of research and personalization. That's how I learned so much about the different use cases. Additionally, we were able to shadow introduction calls with the full time NBAs - this was a great opportunity to get face to face time with Plaid’s future customers and have a bit of exposure to what a ‘client facing role’ entails.

What skill from this internship do you think will help you most in your career?

The ability to uncover pain is something I think will help me most in my career in tech sales. Throughout this program we have been taught how to get to that next level of question and uncover a prospect's true pain. This is something I did not have experience with, even in my previous sales role at my university. The time I’ve spent in calls has taught me how to truly identify a prospect's pain and make it matter. This has made me a much stronger salesperson, and I am grateful for that.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to next year's interns?

A key piece of advice I would give to next year's NBA interns is to jump right into things and embrace discomfort. My biggest opportunities for growth this internship have come from putting myself in situations where I’m not comfortable. Opportunities like “Maz wanna lead this one?” are ones you should almost always say yes to. Jumping right into cold calls, leading disco calls, and other tasks is the best way you can maximize your growth during this program. 

Nicolas Shoda 

Boston College 2027

What skill from this internship do you think will help you most in your career?

The internship taught me a variety of skills; however, I’d say the one that will definitely stick with me longest is the ability to know how to ask the right questions. During the internship, I had to learn how to quickly establish rapport with prospects, and how to ask the right questions in order to assess if integration would be a right fit. Although asking the right questions may sound easy, in reality, it consists of working toward eliminating trust and communication barriers, with someone you may have just met through a video call minutes ago. Asking the right questions will definitely help with my journey of life, whether it is in a professional setting, or personal one; it will assist me in building lasting relationships based on trust and communication.

What made you want to intern at Plaid?

I’m a very curious person; whether it is curiosity driven in understanding how the fintech world runs, or an interest in many different industries, verticals, and business models; they all spark genuine interest. I do not fully know what industry I want to pursue in the long-term future, and I strongly believe Plaid is a great place to be, and immerse yourself into many different industries, each day. As an NBA intern, I got the opportunity to discuss a wide array of industries, such as energy, blockchain, crypto, credit, insurance, capital markets, and many many more. Plaid provided me the space to feed my curiosity, surrounded by great teammates and leadership.

What's something you learned that surprised you?

Something I learned that surprised me was maneuvering around road blocks and challenges, applied to sales. I learned that when outreaching to prospects, you may hit several roadblocks; whether that’s how a prospective customer responds to your outreach or whether they even take your call . Shortly into the internship, I noticed how perseverance and creativity are two incredibly handy traits for any sales position. Outreach can materialize after the 4th week contacting a prospect, or maybe the 8th week. You have to think about creative ways to establish communications with people, and have to be willing to try again, despite facing many challenges and barriers.

Elliott Lee 

University of California, Irvine 2027

What was the most interesting project or problem you worked on?

The most interesting project I worked on was to help our Credit/Lending team with prioritizing and organizing accounts with lending use cases. Through this project, I learned a lot about how Plaid operates in the credit/lending space and how Account Executives approach closing deals with those use cases in the industry. 

What's one piece of advice you'd give to next year's interns?

One of Plaid’s core principles is to ‘Act as Owners’, which encourages individual contributors to look for ways to contribute more to the organization. I highly recommend future interns to take initiative in taking on projects with other cross-functional verticals (marketing, sales engineering, etc.) to gain exposure and learn more about what their processes look like. 

Did you get to shadow calls, build materials, or support a deal process? What was that like?

Yes – as an NBA Intern, there is a plethora of opportunities to shadow New Business Associates and Account Executives to get a better understanding of all moving parts in a contract deal at Plaid. You’re exposed to different parts of the deal process, from leading the initial discovery call to seeing deals close with ACV through our Account Executives. 

How did working cross-functionally shape your experience?

I was able to work with our Sales Engineering team in transforming Plaid’s product demo directory from a collection of links into a searchable knowledge base through automating description patterns, tags, and PPT designs. Through working with them, I was able to understand how product demos are created and how Sales Engineers implements them into later stages of our Banking & Wealth deals. 

Sreenidhi Prakki

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill  2027

What skill from this internship do you think will help you most in your career?

One skill I learned this summer that will help me throughout my career is the power of listening. Coming into this internship, I thought sales was largely about the art of communicating and convincing others. While strong communication is important, I learned that some of the most effective conversations actually come from knowing when to stop talking and truly listen. Whether I was speaking with a prospect, working with a teammate, or learning from a manager, taking the time to understand someone’s needs, motivations, and perspective allowed me to communicate more thoughtfully and build stronger relationships. This internship showed me the very human side of sales where people want to feel understood before they want to be sold to. That is something I know will extend far beyond sales and shape how I approach relationships, leadership, and collaboration throughout my career.

Did you get to shadow calls, build materials, or support a deal process? What was that like?

Throughout the summer, I had the opportunity to participate in nearly every stage of the sales pipeline, from prospecting and outreach to qualification, lead handoff, and supporting deals alongside Account Executives. At the beginning of the internship, I shadowed discovery calls with senior New Business Associates, which helped me understand what makes a strong prospect for Plaid and how to uncover a company’s needs through thoughtful questioning. As the summer progressed, I was able to take more ownership by conducting my own outreach, booking meetings, and eventually leading discovery calls myself. I also worked closely with Account Executives and gained exposure to what happens after qualification, including how opportunities progress toward a closed deal. Being able to see and participate in the entire process gave me a much stronger understanding of how each part of the sales cycle connects.

How did working cross-functionally (with marketing, product, etc.) shape your experience?

During my time at Plaid, I had the opportunity to connect not only with people on the sales team, but also with individuals across the broader organization, from closely related teams like Marketing to Product and Software Engineering. These conversations helped me understand how interconnected each function is and how much collaboration goes into serving a customer effectively. One team that particularly stood out to me was Partnerships, another part of the sales organization. I was surprised by how closely their work overlapped with ours, especially because New Business Associates also play a role in identifying and qualifying potential partnership opportunities. After recognizing that there was an opportunity for our intern cohort to better understand this process, I took the initiative to organize and lead a training on Partnerships and how to properly identify and route those opportunities. That experience showed me the value of looking beyond my immediate role, identifying gaps in cross-functional communication, and taking initiative to help teams work together more effectively.

What's something you learned about communicating value or telling a story with data?

Something I learned about communicating value is the importance of using success stories to make results feel tangible. In sales, you can explain the value of a product in countless ways, but ultimately, people want proof that it works. Customer success stories allowed me to pair data and results with a real-world example, showing prospects how companies with similar challenges were able to achieve measurable outcomes with Plaid. I learned that data is most powerful when it is part of a story. Rather than simply presenting numbers, you can use those numbers to help someone visualize what similar success could look like for them.

Tanushree Podder

Software Engineer @ Plaid 

What project(s) did your intern take on, and why did you choose them?

My intern, Sasha, focused on reducing latency in AuthUser, the main authentication flow in Plaid Link that every user passes through when connecting an account. We chose a problem where writing code was only one part of the work. As AI tools make implementation faster, engineers still need to understand complex systems, find the real problem, and decide which changes are worth making. This project offered exactly that kind of challenge. It is a critical flow spanning multiple services and nested subgraphs, so improving it required Sasha to build an end-to-end understanding, reason through tradeoffs, and turn her findings into safe production changes.

The project also gave Sasha room for stretch opportunities. She turned her trace-analysis process into reusable tooling, then investigated and proposed improvements to the largely undocumented flow that creates a new connection when someone links a financial account. Those stretch projects grew directly from her core work, allowing her to deepen her understanding while taking increasing ownership of where she could contribute most.

How has mentoring shaped the way you think about your own work or team?

Mentoring has made me think more deliberately about what it means to be a force multiplier. The most valuable thing I can do is not provide every answer, but understand what is preventing someone from moving forward and help clear that path. Early on, that may mean reducing ambiguity, sharing context, or connecting them with people who can accelerate their learning. As they build confidence, it means stepping back, giving them room to make decisions, and being available when the problem demands support.

Over the course of the internship, Sasha went from getting oriented in a complex area of our stack to independently identifying problems, shipping production improvements, shaping longer-term architectural work, and helping onboard a new engineer. That progression reinforced for me that good mentorship is measured by whether you create the conditions for someone to take ownership, exercise judgment, and eventually extend that support to others.

Amy Hynes 

Software Engineer @ Plaid 

What project(s) did your intern take on, and why did you choose them?

My intern built a pricing calculator that helps self-serve customers estimate their costs while they’re signing up for Plaid. We picked this project for a few reasons. It was a 0->1 customer facing feature, and our onboarding flow has never given pricing estimates tailored to our customer’s use cases - a gap we’d been wanting to address for a while. The Growth team is revamping the entire onboarding experience this year, so the project slotted directly into work the whole team was already doing, and my intern got to build alongside us rather than off on an island. It also spanned backend, frontend, and some contributions to our design system, so he came away with a real sense of what full-stack engineering at Plaid looks like.

How did you help your intern ramp up in their first few weeks?

I made sure my intern’s starter tasks fed directly into his project - each one was a building block he’d need later in the summer. His first task was contributing a new component to our design system, which he’d end up using in the calculator’s frontend, and which put him in front of the cross-functional people he’d be working with all summer: product, design, and our design system engineers. When it came time to start on the calculator itself, I had him begin with the backend and work his way up the stack, so the knowledge compounded and the pieces fit together naturally as he went. By the time he was building the parts customers would actually see, he had both the technical context and the working relationships to move quickly.

What's a moment you were especially proud of your intern for?

This project left a lot of room for my intern to weigh in on product and design decisions, and early on he held back, preferring to defer to our product manager and designer. Watching him grow from those early days to driving those conversations was the most rewarding part of the summer. 

The turning point was a project meeting about how to display cost estimates. The design at the time showed a first-month total. My intern pushed to add a monthly average and an annual total alongside it, arguing that a single month in isolation wouldn’t give customers the picture they needed. He made the case, the team came around, and all three numbers sit prominently in the calculator today. I was impressed to see my intern’s sense of what makes for a good customer experience. That instinct, and the confidence to argue for it, is exactly what makes a successful product engineer on Growth.

Justin Lin 

Engineering Manager  @ Plaid 

What surprised you about working with your intern?

The thing that surprised me most was how quickly Brooke picked things up. She came in ready to learn, but within a few weeks she was fluent in AI-assisted development, comfortable working across different parts of the product, asking thoughtful questions, and taking on work that was not originally on her plate. She also developed a strong instinct for the details that can make or break a user experience, thought through how to robustly set up and measure experiments, and she grew beyond thinking only about whether the code worked.

How did your intern’s work connect to Plaid’s mission?

Brooke’s work connected to Plaid’s mission by making difficult parts of the financial experience simpler and more trustworthy. One project made it easier for users to tell us when something in their experience did not look right. Her larger project focused on reducing friction in onboarding and identity verification by allowing eligible returning users to reuse information they had already provided, while still giving them control over what they shared. In both cases, she was working toward a better user experience without losing sight of privacy, security, and trust.

To our 2026 Plinterns: thank you for the energy, the ideas, and the heart you brought all summer. From production fires to customer demos, you made an impact—and you made this place better for it. Go do great things. See you soon! 

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