An internship at Ambrook gives you real working experience on a range of projects — and an opportunity to get out of the office.
I was sitting on the floor of Chicago’s airport, trying to make my way home to New York from a customer visit in Missouri. As the gate agent announced another hour of delays, I was debugging a PDF rendering bug that a customer had flagged and recording a Loom to explain the cause of the bug.
It was a happy memory.
That’s the joy of interning at a startup — you get to jump right into the thick of things and what you build has a real impact on customers.
As Ambrook’s first engineering intern — intern of any kind, actually — I was a bit of a test case. I spent my summer in the cozy New York office, working alongside a small-but-mighty team of engineers. I spent most of my time building our new taxes, discounts, and fees feature into our invoicing product; fixed bugs and shipped highly requested small updates; and spent valuable time with customers to understand their needs.
I’m currently a student at UC Berkeley, studying computer science and linguistics. There were lots of appealing internship opportunities out there, not all of them even in engineering — before this, I managed events for a nonprofit. Ambrook excited me specifically because I knew I’d have the ability to be able to build things that are useful to people outside the tech world. I craved the ability to see the actual impact of work I was doing.
School can only teach you so much; I was looking forward to spending the summer learning a new tech stack (Typescript & GraphQL) and getting comfortable inside a large React codebase. Ambrook has a very experienced team and, throughout the summer, I was able to pick up a bunch — technical and non-technical — from everyone I was working with. For example, I gained communication soft skills from running a series of customer demos, and I learned a whole new set of Typescript tricks and technical concepts like GraphQL resolvers.
Sam, second from left, with Ambrook customer Josh Kennedy to his right and several colleagues.
It’s a smaller team, too, which gives you the opportunity to gain more hands-on experience. Within my first week at Ambrook, I shipped internal notes on invoices, a highly requested feature by customers. I don’t think I’d be able to hit the ground running like that at a bigger company. I appreciated that throughout the summer we had weekly Weeding Days (fka Bug Day) where I got to spend time working on a broad set of features that touched different parts of the product beyond my main internship project.
I enjoy building things in general, but I enjoy building things that people use even more. At Ambrook, we work closely alongside design partners (a small group of farmers and ranchers who help us improve our software in real time) to build a better product. Having a direct connection with our customers made my work very fulfilling. Through my conversations with working farmers, I gained an appreciation for the complex operations they manage and the ways they care for their land. As a city kid who grew up in Singapore, I had a lot to learn.
As part of the design partner program, I joined a few colleagues on a farm visit to Aurora, Missouri. We were visiting Josh Kennedy, owner and operator of 4K Cattle Co.; he’s been using Ambrook since earlier this year.
Josh works in the cattle backgrounding business; this forces him to make split-second decisions at auctions. He can only do that with a comprehensive understanding of his books, so I was glad that he was able to pull these numbers instantly through Ambrook and use them to make informed investments into the future of his business. He said it’s allowed him to spend more time on the ranch or with his family and less time doing the books. For me, that made this work incredibly rewarding.
No one has one role at startups though, and side quests are bound to pop up. At the end of the visit with Josh, who is also a fireman, we got some lessons on how to carry people out of burning buildings. I volunteered myself for the demonstration. Another highlight from the summer was helping the whole team set up for the Lettuce Party we held at our office! One minute we were on a call with a user discussing their sales tax setup, the next we were packing lettuce into goodie bags for our guests.
Making friends on the farm.
Outside of direct customer interactions, most of my days at Ambrook were spent working on my main project: sales taxes, discounts and fees. Ambrook’s first target market was agricultural businesses, which are exempt from sales tax. As a company, we’re now expanding into new verticals — for example, equine and agritourism businesses. These operations aren’t exempt from sales tax, so our product needs to adapt so we can bring on more customers.
I built this feature into our invoicing product; it allows customers to maintain a catalog of taxes, discounts and fees, apply them to invoices, and then produce a report to help them pay their sales taxes. All summer, I learned about the complex world of sales tax. Turns out every state, jurisdiction and district in the US can have wildly different tax regulations!
Once a week, though, we take a break from that for Weeding Day. The whole engineering team switches our focus to fixing bugs and shipping small improvements to our platform. I used this day as a time to level up my knowledge and skills by:
Working on parts of the codebase that my main project didn’t touch, for example, improving the reconciliation user experience and redesigning invoice PDFs.
Pairing with more engineers from the team, all with their own styles — I learned about how others work and picked up technical and personal workplace setup tricks I’d never considered. Something particularly interesting was the different way folks used AI-based tools like Claude Code to make themselves more productive. At school, there’s a fair bit of resistance to AI tooling and being in an AI-positive environment was a shift.
Pairing with non-engineering members of the Ambrook team, to get feedback and to build features for them.
Working on a small engineering team means that you get to take on a fair bit of responsibility, but you also have a team of people around you to support. I appreciated that I got to take the lead on my project from an engineering perspective while working with my mentor Jaclyn for code reviews, as well as our design and product teams. It really helped to have others to bounce questions off of as the feature was built out.
Overall, my internship at Ambrook helped me figure out what to look for in a job after I graduate. I want to build something that matters, with practical applications in the real world. I want to work alongside talented people who put care and attention into everything they do. I want to know that my work is meaningful, improving the lives of real people. And I want to keep learning and growing along the way.
