Zoox

The food is the best food I've had at a company, hands down. We have an in-house kitchen run by a chef who worked at the French Laundry. It's healthy, tasty, and free. They have different cultural themes for every lunch and dinner, in addition to salad and halal chicken options for people with dietary restrictions.

None of the big companies (Google/Facebook) can compete with the quality, diversity, and healthiness of the Zoox food.

Onto the engineering stuff. My project was by far the most interesting that I've worked on at a company so far. I have learned the most out of any internship I've had so far here at Zoox, and the opportunities for learning and growth are unbounded.

They gave me a legit machine learning project that I could take full ownership over. Some of my friends at larger companies got drowned out with smaller projects that weren't necessarily as interesting.

Everyone on my team was really easy to talk to, and I really liked the mission and culture at Zoox. It was nice that my project wasn't directly mission-critical, as well, so there was less stress in having to complete my project ASAP.

They definitely expect a lot out of you. Sometimes it can be tough balancing the work schedule, but as an intern there are a lot of avenues to help with that balance. We have group intern lunches every week, and we also have a speaker series every week where people from various levels of Zoox management come and talk to us about how they got to Zoox and give career advice to us young interns. I'd expect it to be a bit more difficult to maintain that work-life balance as a full-time employee, but as an intern, I thought it was manageable.