What an internship at Algolia actually looks like ?

What does a Software Engineering internship actually look like when you are trusted with a real research question?

I spent six months with Algolia’s Generative AI team, working on Agent Studio and exploring whether distributed AI agents were actually worth the extra complexity.

But this article is not really about multi-agent architectures.

What made the internship interesting was the level of ownership behind that question.

There was no expected conclusion to prove and no predefined implementation to deliver.

And that also meant accepting that a technically interesting idea could simply fail to justify its cost.

Some hypotheses worked. Others did not.

In both cases, the job was the same: understand why, make the evidence strong enough to support a decision, and turn what we learned into something useful for the team.

And that only works in the right environment.

I tried to tell that part of the experience through Algolia’s five values: Trust, Grit, Candor, Humility and Care — not as abstract principles, but through what they looked like in practice while doing the work.

And the story does not end with the internship: I’ll soon be joining Algolia again, this time as a Software Engineer.