As we look back on another unforgettable summer, we’re thrilled to celebrate the fourth cohort of the Fastly Internship Program. What started in 2023 as an ambitious step toward empowering emerging tech talent has solidified into a vital part of our culture – a hands-on launchpad where early-career engineers tackle real production code, push boundaries, and directly contribute to building a better, faster, and more secure internet.
From day one, these interns dove headfirst into high-impact projects, bringing fresh perspectives, sharp problem-solving skills, and unmatched enthusiasm to teams across the entire organization.
As we catch our breath after an action-packed summer, it’s time to highlight the work, insights, and individuals that made this year’s program so exceptional.
Meet the extraordinary Fastly interns who defined Summer 2026.
Meet the 2026 Intern Cohort
Julia Tuinman - Growth Engineering
Summer Project: Julia modernized Fastly’s Internal Usage System (IUS), used by engineering and ops teams for budget tracking and resource planning. She built the backend for Phase 1 of Cloud Cost Tracking and engineered Multi-Role System Support, eliminating the need for external spreadsheets and fixing a single-role limitation that stripped user privileges. To do this, Julia built a data pipeline to ingest, verify, and export cloud cost data within IUS while updating permission logic to support concurrent roles. “This streamlined daily workflows for internal engineering and finance teams by centralizing tool usage, while giving IUS the flexibility to seamlessly support new roles and features in the future.”
Life @ Fastly: “This summer was defined by an incredible mix of strong support and a great culture. From day one, my team made me feel completely supported. They answered my questions quickly, tried to unblock me whenever I hit a wall, and genuinely invested in my growth. What made the experience even more special was the culture outside of typical work routines. Instead of sitting in standard meeting rooms for every check-in, my mentors and I would go on 1-on-1 walks, which made conversations feel much more dynamic and approachable. Combined with getting to know teammates on a personal level through team events and casual conversations, Fastly quickly felt like a community where I was truly valued both as an engineer and as a person.”
Advice for future interns: “If you have the chance to intern at Fastly, DO IT! You won't be given throwaway "intern-only" tasks, the work you do directly impacts real systems and team workflows, and the engineers here genuinely value your contributions from day one. To make the most of your time, ask questions constantly and look beyond the immediate scope of your project. If you hit a roadblock or see a system that isn't working as expected, ask "why" to understand the bigger architecture, be curious about your work and its impact! Above all, live in the moment and be a sponge. The experience goes by fast, so take every opportunity to soak in knowledge, CONNECT WITH PEOPLE beyond working here, and enjoy the journey!”
Kevin Garcia - Network Functions and Architecture (NFARCH)
Summer Project: Kevin built MARA, a scoring framework that quantifies network transit quality into Fastly’s infrastructure across latency, throughput, and packet loss. By assigning a 0-to-1 score based on the worst-performing metric, MARA ensures bottlenecks are never masked by averages. To make the data actionable, Kevin delivered three interfaces: mara-cli for real-time interactive terminal troubleshooting, automated summary integrations for the Daily Override Report team, and an analytics panel in the daily-report frontend with sortable tables and time-series charts. “Before MARA, engineers had raw telemetry that was too granular to act on. Now, there’s a single data-driven answer to identify underperforming transit, evaluate peering changes, and accelerate incident response – directly optimizing network reliability, cost decisions, and end-user performance.”
Life @ Fastly: “Beyond the project work, the team culture stood out to me, since people were generous with their time and happy to walk through how a legacy system worked or why a certain design decision was made years ago, even when they were busy. I also appreciated that Fastly treats interns like real contributors rather than just observers, since I was pushing code into production systems and not just a sandbox. Outside of the day-to-day work, it was great getting to know the other interns and hearing about the wildly different projects everyone was tackling across the company, which gave me a much better sense of just how much surface area Fastly's engineering org covers.”
Advice for future interns: “My biggest piece of advice is to read the documentation and then go read the code, since the real understanding of MARA came from tracing how the pieces actually connected rather than stopping at the README. I'd also encourage future interns to look for the gaps and not just the feature list, since some of my most useful contributions weren't new features but things like flagging a mislabeled dashboard component or noticing that two codebases had quietly diverged – fresh eyes catch things people close to a project stop seeing. Finally, talk to the people who will actually use what you're building. Knowing that engineers wanted both quick CLI lookups and a visual dashboard shaped how I split up the work in a way I never would have gotten from the ticket alone.”
Kyle Ortzow - The A3F Team (anti-automation, abuse and fraud)
Summer Project: Kyle developed a machine learning classification model to automatically analyze and categorize TLS fingerprints across customer traffic. By facilitating automated fingerprint evaluation against large data, Kyle’s model streamlines the workflow for Fastly’s bot detection teams – cutting down the time required to evaluate, label, and respond to new fingerprint signatures. “By accelerating our fingerprint identification process and scaling the volume of signatures we can analyze simultaneously, this tool directly strengthens our security protections, helping us catch malicious bot traffic faster and keep customer applications safe.”
Life @ Fastly: “Life at Fastly has been great. Everyone here is super kind and welcoming, and it's been such a positive experience. You learn so much just from working here and from talking to the people around you, who are incredibly experienced. Having that kind of access is such a valuable resource.”
Advice for future interns: “My advice… make sure you build connections with other people here. Twelve weeks flies by, so you should really make the most of your time – but also stay focused on your project and deliver the best results you can.”
Leisha Figuerres - Control Systems
Summer Project: Leisha built a new Go microservice from the ground up to support our fleet infrastructure. She set up the CI/CD pipeline, built an in-memory lazy caching engine, ported API endpoints, and verified accuracy with traffic shadowing before leading the full production rollout using traffic shifting. “We observed promising improvements in latency and reduction in query time, while leaving behind a proven migration blueprint for our team as we decouple the remaining endpoints.”
Life @ Fastly: "My life at Fastly has been an enthralling and wonderful experience. The company culture is nothing short of amazing. I always felt supported enough to walk up to anyone and kick off a conversation. Working closely with my team, mentors, and intern cohort made every day rewarding. The technical work itself was thrilling, deeply immersive, and valuable. Shout out to my summer project, FLAPI, that I will always hold near and dear to my heart."
Advice for future interns: “The internship will go by extremely fast so it's very important to remember to have fun! It is very easy to get spun up within your work, however, this internship is meant to be a well rounded experience -- granting you connections and memories you won't forget. Nourish your time at Fastly by meeting as many people as you can, learning everything under the hood, and having a blast with your cohort. Your project and work will come together, just trust the process.”
Matthew Wlazlo - NGWAF Rules
Summer Project: Matthew’s project was developing a machine learning model to mitigate false positives for Fastly's Next Gen WAF (NGWAF). The model is a secondary classifier for Smartparse, looking at its output and determining whether it's truly malicious or really a false positive. “The impact this has for Fastly customers is less business disruptions from accidentally blocked user requests, cultivating more dependability and trust.”
Life @ Fastly: “Working at Fastly was my first professional software engineering experience and I'm glad this is where I started. Fastly is such a welcoming and warm place that enables its employees to thrive. I had a fantastic summer that I will never forget. I love my cohort and all the people I worked with.”
Advice for future interns: “Don't be afraid to look stupid and ask as many questions as you can. You aren't expected to know everything, but you are expected to learn. Asking questions is the best way to learn during the internship. Making mistakes is another great way to learn, so while it is scary, try not to be afraid of failing either. Take everything as a learning experience and grow from it.”
Ndiana Akpan - UX Platform
Summer Project: Ndiana worked on modernizing Fastly’s feature flag system by migrating legacy Ember workflows to React. This upgrade improves the UI but also unlocks granular JSONLogic targeting, multi-variant testing, expiration dates and explicit flag ownership across customer accounts. “As a result, product teams can execute safer, highly controlled feature releases while giving Fastly a scalable, unified control plane that drastically reduces technical debt.”
Life @ Fastly: “I gained a lot of real-world engineering skills through my project but have also learned through doing social donuts with a range of employees ranging from Security Architects to Sales Engineers. I also loved spending time working on puzzles and yapping with the other interns.”
Advice to future interns: “Be open to new connections and learn from the huge technical knowledge available at Fastly. Also do not be afraid to ask questions. Fastly is super technical and asking questions will always help you and not harm.”
Sophia Marinova - Control Systems
Summer Project: Sophia migrated existing service configuration functionality to a new Go microservice. She built core foundational infrastructure for the new service, including implementing authorization, managing backend interactions, and adding full test coverage. “This project establishes a more reliable and scalable experience in service configuration.”
Life @ Fastly: “From my very first day, I was greeted with a warm welcome at Fastly, and throughout the summer, I felt fully immersed as a professional engineer.”
Advice to interns: “Believe in your capabilities and lead with quiet confidence. Advocate for yourself while maintaining a healthy balance between work and meaningful connections, staying present in each moment rather than rushing toward the finish line.”
Summer Dixon - Network Operations
Summer Project: Summer worked on the Peering Portal, a self-service platform enabling external network operators to directly request BGP peering sessions with Fastly. She implemented core functionality including authentication with peeringdb, shared location computing, session status visibility, and automated Jira ticketing with email confirmations. “By replacing manual email workflows with automated processing, the portal significantly streamlines operations for Internet Account Managers, improves auditability, and accelerates peering configurations to lower reliance on higher-cost transit providers.”
Life @ Fastly: “From the start of the interview process, it was clear that Fastly truly embodies its values and prioritizes both technical excellence and real engineering impact. Everyone here is exceptionally welcoming and supportive. Beyond our day-to-day work, the internship program was packed with incredible experiences – from professional development workshops on financial literacy and presentation skills to social events and a trip to Denver for Tech Summit. Being able to connect with engineers across the company, meet executives, and celebrate our accomplishments together made this summer unforgettable.”
Advice to future interns: "Write everything down in a centralized location (physical notebook, Notion, Google Doc, etc.). Make a roadmap of your intern project at the very start, breaking it down into key milestones and the granular steps under each milestone. I used FigJam for this, and it helped keep me on track! Ask your manager for the feedback at the end of every check-in and raise blockers with them immediately – they often know who to ask and can get you unblocked pretty quickly. Quantify the impact of your work whenever possible. Look for measurable outcomes like developer time saved, performance gains (e.g., API response speedups), improved test coverage, or business value delivered rather than vanity metrics like lines of code written.
Teagan Haddaway - Team XQD, Compute Platform
Summer Project: Teagan focused on expanding the capabilities of Viceroy, Fastly’s local testing environment for Compute applications. He engineered local HTTP Caching support within Viceroy, allowing developers to test and validate their edge caching logic offline before deploying code to production. Previously, testing cache configurations required pushing changes directly to the cloud environment. By bringing HTTP Caching functionality directly to the local CLI, Teagan’s work aims to significantly increase platform parity between local development and production. “This has the potential to allow our customers to catch potential caching issues early in their development cycle, dramatically speeding up their iteration time and giving them confidence before their code ever touches live production traffic."
Life @ Fastly: “Fastly is a great environment to grow and learn in. The people are so supportive and understanding of this being early in their career and are more than willing to help. Everyone is very supportive and there to make you feel accepted and like you belong here.”
Advice to future interns: “Absorb as much information as you can while you are here. A piece of advice I was given on my first week was to drink from the firehose of information. Fastly is a technically deep company and there is so much to learn so just trying to learn as much as you can while you are here will serve you well and keep you curious.”
Theo Lecuyer - Traffic Management Systems (TRAMS)
Summer Project: Theo’s project was about building a pipeline that gathers utilization data from the newly released Fastly DNS product. This pipeline gathers "Top Talkers" DNS data from across the Fastly network into one place and visualizes it in a dashboard, giving operators a global view of its authoritative DNS service traffic patterns. “Operators can now spot which zones may be experiencing DDoS traffic significantly faster, and the team gets real insight into how customers use Fastly DNS day to day.”
Life @ Fastly: “One of my highlights was playing on Fastly FC, the company soccer team. It was a great way to meet people from all over the company and build connections outside my own team. The people are really what stuck out to me at Fastly, and I genuinely felt like part of the community.”
Advice to future interns: "First, meet and connect with Fastlyans outside of your own team and org. There's always something to learn from a different perspective, and some of the best conversations I had all summer came from people I wasn't working with directly. Second, savor it! The summer goes faster than you think, so take the time to enjoy where you are, who you're around, and how much you're learning while it's happening."
Empowering the Next Generation of Engineers
Our fourth intern cohort didn’t just meet expectations, they actively elevated our technology and enriched our culture. Whether optimizing backend architectures, enhancing developer tooling, or organizing ping pong tournaments and ERG meetups, their impact left a lasting imprint across Fastly.
We remain deeply committed to building an environment where curious minds are supported, challenged, and empowered to do the best work of their careers. To our Summer 2026 cohort: thank you for your hard work, your thought-provoking questions, and your dedication.
Ready to launch your career and shape the future of the web? Explore open roles and future opportunities.