This summer, the Emerging Talent team proudly welcomed 43 interns to Dropbox as part of our 2025 Camp Dropbox Intern Program. Representing 27 colleges and universities—including six international institutions in Canada, Poland, and Ireland—this year’s cohort brought a wealth of diverse perspectives and experiences. Of the group, 28 interns joined our Engineering teams, and over the course of 12 weeks (May through September), they immersed themselves in meaningful work, continuous learning, and our Virtual First culture.
The Dropbox Intern Program is thoughtfully designed to cultivate growth, spark innovation, and build lasting connections. Interns benefited from more than 6,000 hours of dedicated one-on-one mentorship, tackled high-impact projects aligned with team and company goals, and explored hands-on applications of AI. Many of these projects supported the development of Dropbox Dash, our AI-powered universal search product. Robust programming—including Virtual First events, ERG activities, and the in-person Emerging Talent Summit—created further opportunities for connection and community. By the end of the summer, these interns had made meaningful contributions across our engineering organization.
Below, our interns share what they worked on this summer, from big technical wins to moments of creativity, collaboration, and growth that shaped their time at Dropbox.
“I tackled the Dropbox file history tracking system. As an engineering intern working in a large production database for the first time, I learned the importance of strongly tested, verifiable code and thoughtful system design. I really aligned with the core Dropbox values of Be Worthy of Trust and Keep It Simple at the software level. This solution simplifies our metadata infrastructure, significantly reduces operational costs, and shows how thoughtful refactoring of legacy systems can deliver both technical elegance and substantial business value.”
—Rhea Rai, Filesystem Data
“During my internship with the ML Platform team, I worked on a system that monitors the health of ML model deployments. By integrating with internal inference services, AI Sentinel gives machine learning engineers real-time operational visibility they previously had to gather manually. The result is greater deployment confidence and faster iteration cycles, ensuring reliable ML model deployments that power Dash’s intelligent features at scale.”
—Ben Juntilla, ML Platform
“I worked on reducing front end latency in Magic Pocket. Elevated PUT latencies during scheduled disk restarts can delay updates in workflows like Dash connectors, leaving users with outdated or missing content. To address this, I built a cache to track storage health and added a filtering option to skip degraded volumes. This health-aware routing reduces slow writes and gives operators greater control, ensuring Dropbox delivers timely, accurate search results.”
—Albert Joon Sung, Storage Core
“I worked on an AI-powered tool built on top of our internal migration platform that automates code migrations. Developers can launch auto-migration jobs on selected folders for specific migration types. Successful runs open a pull request automatically; otherwise, you can run the command locally and submit changes manually. The tool is fully customizable via the CLI or as part of an automated workflow. With it, I completed two major migrations.”
—Ahmed Ibrahim, Web Developer Experience
“I built tools that give machine learning engineers access to the most up-to-date information in the Dash persistence store. With this, downstream teams can train models on fresher data and pull in additional metadata fields from third-party systems without waiting for the Connector Platform team to redownload or repackage anything.”
—Eddie Ormseth, Connector Platform
“I worked on expanding the unified search platform (USP) to support more than 20 languages. The USP powers search across Dropbox products like Replay, and my project integrated a language detection pipeline into both indexing and retrieval. This enables accurate, efficient multilingual search without the overhead of traditional solutions. By delivering native language support ahead of this year’s Dash launch, my work helps Dropbox scale globally, improve the developer experience, and unlock richer search for international customers, bringing us closer to our vision of an AI-first, universally accessible search platform.”
—Rishi Peddakama, Retrieval Platform
“I explored advanced anomaly detection techniques for our Vortex2 metrics system. Traditional static alerting can miss sudden, meaningful shifts in data that don’t cross predefined thresholds (or trigger too often when changes are expected). To address this, I developed adaptive detection methods that adjust to evolving patterns. These improvements streamline alert creation and reduce alert fatigue, enhancing the on-call experience. By accounting for seasonality, the new anomaly detection functions also enable faster response times and improve the overall developer experience.”
—Yonatan Ginsburg, Metrics
“I developed a seamless document preview experience within Dropbox Dash, allowing users to quickly view file content without leaving their search context. This enhancement supports the Dropbox mission to accelerate workflows by reducing context switching and increasing engagement. I built interactive UI components, integrated PDF viewing, and implemented dynamic follow-up features linking to AI-powered chat.”
—Francesca Venditti, Find & Discover
“This summer on the Analytics Platform team, I worked on optimizing large-scale Databricks queries and ETL pipelines to reduce compute cost and latency. I developed an optimization recommendation system that flagged high-cost query patterns, expensive table-column filters, and under-allocated compute resources, complete with actionable sourcing information. I also prototyped and documented an Airflow pipeline to migrate a 500 TB mobile events log to liquid clustering, paving the way for broader adoption of modern data layout techniques.”
—Sanjith Udupa, Analytics Platform
“I built an extensible AI web-automation agent for Dropbox. I also connected Dropbox backend APIs via searchFile and uploadFile actions to fetch and upload files, using open-source foundations. By keeping tool sets small and modular, developers can quickly compose reliable, task-specific automations, like form filling or proofreading. As demand for automating repetitive web tasks continues to grow, integrating automation tools into Dash will significantly improve the user experience.”
—Alan Zhu, Conversational AI
Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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