Melanie Foltak and Olatoye (Toye) Sobayo have very different roles at Audible, but they arrived the same way: through our summer internship. Melanie was a software engineering student at the University of Waterloo when she connected with us at the Grace Hopper Conference in late 2024. Toye learned about our internship through a recruiter while studying computer science at Rutgers University. Both say their internships turned what they were learning in school into practical experience, and gave them a clearer sense of what they wanted from a workplace.

“Being able to take what you’ve learned in the classroom and apply it in the real world is so valuable,” says Melanie. Her university emphasizes internships, so she completed six, alternating academic terms with work placements. Audible’s was her last. Experiencing several workplaces from the inside, she says, “I got to learn what I liked, or didn’t, about each company. I got to see how people tackle problems differently from smaller organizations to larger ones.”

While interning with us, she says, “one of the things that stood out for me was that I felt proud to work at Audible, especially with all the community impact work they do in Newark. I really liked the idea of working for a tech company that does good.” She adds, “It's always cool to work for a company whose product you actually use.”

Her internship included an AI-focused project, which showed her the company was working at the leading edge of tech and finding new ways to innovate on behalf of listeners. Now she works on Audible’s content and royalty side, doing catalog ingestion. Her team handles audiobook metadata, such as authors, publication dates and pricing, as titles become available on our service. “I feel happy when I come to work every day with a smile,” she says. “All of that was a big factor in why I wanted to return to Audible.”

Toye completed three internships at Rutgers, including one at Audible, and says it made a difference when he came back full time: “When I came back, onboarding was a lot quicker.” He returned as a software engineer, working on a team that collects and processes user behaviors and sends that data to teams working to make Audible’s experience even more personalized and engaging.

Why did he return? Location was one reason. “I already lived in New Jersey, so this made it convenient for when I want to see my family, and also being super close to New York City is nice.” The housing stipend for employees living in Newark is also valuable. “Another thing is the company culture. My team consists of very cool, very knowledgeable people. Being able to learn from them and see how they think and have them mentor you — I didn’t get much of that at previous internships.”

The hub itself was a draw, too. “I find that I work best in an office, five days a week, with my teammates — and I love the food, the barista, and the workspaces,” says Toye. Melanie, who lives in Manhattan, loves the commuter card benefit and says she craves the routine of coming into the office each day.

Toye’s advice for students applying for an Audible internship: keep your résumé current and polished, use LeetCode to “practice your system design, object-oriented programming — get those bases covered,” and above all, prepare to answer questions about what you would do in various work situations. “It’s hard when you don’t yet have many experiences yet,” he acknowledges, so he keeps a journal of decisions he’s made, their outcomes, and what he learned.

Both make a strong case for adding humanities classes to a computer science or engineering course load. Toye took several classes in philosophy and now sees a connection between technology’s abstract questions and system design. “System design involves choices about how distributed systems, databases, security, and monitoring should work together,” he explains. “During meetings, we’ll sometimes get into engagements that sound like we could be arguing about some philosophical topic or some application” — a way of thinking he knows well.

Melanie’s software engineering program sat within her university’s electrical engineering school, so her coursework spanned circuits, differential equations, mathematical proofs and algebra. After taking courses in machine learning and psychology, she noticed some of the same diagrams appeared in each, a reminder of the interesting overlap between how computers learn and how people think.

Now Melanie has come full circle and is hoping to mentor and manage her own intern. “It’s always nice to have someone around who’s super eager to learn and has a fresh perspective. I think having interns at work is a real benefit.”

See open Technology roles at Audible