Summer 2025 Plinterns: A look back

Every summer, Plaid welcomes a class of curious, driven, and wildly talented interns—our Plinterns—to work across engineering & new business sales. This year, our 2025 Plinterns joined us from across the country, contributing to projects that push the boundaries of fintech, from AI-powered development tools to outbound strategy for emerging markets.

Whether they were working from our San Francisco or New York offices, jumping into discovery calls, architecting backend systems, or enjoying a boba run, our interns left a real impact on the people and the products that power Plaid.

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

Here's what they had to say:

🧠 Engineering Interns

Rahul Khanna
Team: Credit
UCLA 2026
What's a moment that made you feel part of the team? One of the best parts of Plaid has consistently been the culture and community; whether it's taking a quick walk around Manhattan for post-meeting coffee or watching a Broadway show for the first time with other interns, I’ve always felt extremely close to the team. My favorite moment in particular has to be the plintern picnic near Chelsea piers - playing board games while talking, eating, and listening to music was an amazing vibe.

What made this internship different from others you’ve had? This internship was especially unique compared to my previous ones because of the level of attention dedicated to the interns. Our projects were, as a whole, significantly more high-impact and technically interesting than my previous projects, and it was clear that Plaid was passionate about making interns a first priority in terms of support. Everyone, from our mentors to PMs to even the CTO and CEO, was incredibly welcoming and made every possible effort to welcome and teach us. This was very different from other companies where interns felt like a second thought.

What advice would you give the next class of Plinterns? The biggest advice I can give to the next Plinterns is to take complete advantage of the opportunities here. Essentially everyone at the company is receptive to having a coffee chat (including executive board!), and it's a great way to gain additional perspective on other parts of the company, or other technical fields.

Aishwarya Chakravarthy
Team: Credit
Georgia Tech 2026
What new tools, frameworks, or ideas did you pick up this summer? I was able to pick up several tools and frameworks this summer, including the Go and gRPC stack, AWS Sagemaker (used for ML tasks), as well as encryption and compression with respect to S3 buckets.

What did your day-to-day at Plaid look like? My day-to-day at Plaid involved a standup with my team where we discussed our progress and blockers, as well as some dedicated individual work time. I also met with my mentor every day to discuss progress and next steps in relation to my project. Plaid also did a great job of organizing intern events so that I could end the day with a fun activity.

What made this internship different from others you’ve had? This internship stood out from my previous experiences due to the significant independence I had in shaping and executing my project. In past internships, projects were typically fully scoped in advance, leaving me little room for architectural or design input. At Plaid, however, I was given a high-level problem statement and the autonomy to define the approach. This responsibility challenged me to make meaningful design decisions and ultimately contributed to a very rewarding learning experience.

What advice would you give the next class of Plinterns? One piece of advice I'd give to future Plinterns is to stay open-minded about how you approach your project and the direction it takes. Plaid does an excellent job of framing projects as open-ended problems, which gives you the freedom to iterate and even pivot as you learn more. Don’t be afraid to take your project in a new direction if something interesting emerges!

🤖 Machine Learning Interns

Ozgur Can Seckin
Team: Data Foundations and AI
Indiana University, Bloomington 2026
What new tools, frameworks, or ideas did you pick up this summer? I’ve trained language models before, but this internship pushed me further. I picked up new objectives like contrastive learning and learned to track training and evaluation at scale with MLflow. I also got hands-on with SageMaker for ML workloads and used Spark to wrangle big data. All in all, it was an awesome crash course in running machine-learning projects in the real world!

What made this internship different from others you’ve had? What stands out most is the fast-paced environment and the huge potential for impact. Everyone genuinely wants to make a difference and they actually have the freedom to do it by the senior management. I’ve never seen so many people spontaneously huddle up to brainstorm ways to make the company better. It’s energizing to work alongside teammates who are so motivated to drive change. Plus, the talent here is remarkable; I’m constantly surrounded by incredibly smart, dedicated people.

What advice would you give the next class of Plinterns? You will start learning from day one. Actively listen to everyone: your mentor, your buddy, the managers… and ask questions. Go grab coffee with the others in the team and get to know them, make friends. See what impact you can make on top of your project and go further. Enjoy SF/NYC!

Jennifer Kim
Team: Scaled Access
MIT 2026
What was a surprising challenge you faced—and how did you tackle it? This was my first time using Cursor and Unblocked to help me code, so it’s been interesting learning how to use them effectively. There’s definitely a balance to strike, knowing when to lean on them and when to step back and think through things yourself. It’s awesome that Plaid encourages the use of AI tools, because they’ve helped me debug faster, experiment with new ideas, and feel more confident in exploring unfamiliar parts of the codebase. I see this as an important skill for the future of software engineering, and I’m really glad I had the chance to build it during my internship.

What made this internship different from others you’ve had? One of the things I loved most about my internship was having full ownership over my project. I had the chance to think deeply about different aspects of the work and come up with new ideas to improve it. It was also amazing to collaborate with people across several teams to bring everything together and make the project the best it could be. Beyond the work itself, the people at Plaid are truly what make the experience special. Everyone is so open and willing to chat about work, career paths, or just life in general. The lunches and social events were some of my favorite parts of the summer, and I’ve really loved getting to know everyone. People here are also incredibly helpful and always happy to answer questions, which made a huge difference throughout the internship.

What advice would you give the next class of Plinterns? Learn as much as you can from your mentor and other people at Plaid. People at Plaid are incredibly talented, and it’s been amazing to learn from them and pick up new skills along the way. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, especially about their reasoning, so you can understand what to consider when making technical decisions. And definitely make time for lunch and dinner with your teammates! Those moments were some of the most fun and helped me feel much more connected to everyone at Plaid.