Reliability Through Fresh Eyes: Inside the Rootly Intern Program

At Rootly, we believe reliability isn’t just a technical problem, it’s a people problem. Distributed systems don’t stay up and resilient because of code and tools alone. They stay up because teams are prepared, empowered, and trained to respond in the most critical moments.

That’s why when most are cancelling, postponing, or not starting their intern programs, we're doubling down on ours. We’re investing in the next generation of  leaders. And we’re doing it right here at home: all of our interns are from the University of Waterloo, one of Canada’s premier institutions for engineering and computer science.

Reliability needs the next generation

Incident management and site reliability engineering are often thought of as senior disciplines. It’s the kind of work you do after years of learning and experiencing failures. We think that assumption is wrong.

In fact, we believe reliability is exactly where students should start. Here’s why:

1. High leverage learning: Incidents expose how systems really work, the brittle edges, the human factors, the tools that help or hinder. There’s no faster way to learn how technology and people interact under pressure.
2. AI is reshaping the playbook: The reliability practices of the past won’t be the same in five years. Students entering the field today will help define the new best practices.
3. Empathy matters: Reliability is about people as much as systems. Students often bring a collaborative, curious, empathetic approach that’s essential for incident response.

By giving interns direct exposure to real incidents, real customers, and real responsibility, we’re training the next generation of reliability leaders, not in theory, but in practice.

Building with AI: when fresh talent meets new tools

AI is reshaping how teams operate. For the first time, interns can build, ship, and learn at a velocity that used to take years of experience. With the right tools, mentorship, and context, AI gives our interns leverage that even senior engineers didn’t have a few years ago.

At Rootly, our mission is to redefine incident management and reliability for the AI era. That means combining human curiosity with machine intelligence to uncover insights, automate responses, and reimagine how teams handle the most critical moments.

The Rootly interns aren’t just learning with AI, they’re building with it. They use copilots to debug faster, test reliability workflows at scale, and prototype ideas that used to require entire engineering cycles. Their fresh perspectives, guided by AI’s power, help us see patterns and possibilities that experienced engineers might miss.

This generation doesn’t carry the weight of “how it’s always been done.” That’s exactly why they’re helping us design how reliability will be done next.

That’s why we’ve built our program in partnership with the University of Waterloo, home to some of Canada’s brightest engineering and computer science minds. Together, we’re equipping students with not just technical depth, but AI fluency: the ability to use machine intelligence to see systems, people, and processes in entirely new ways.

When interns become a force for change

Bringing on interns to increase your company size more than 20% all at once isn’t just an expansion, it’s a transformation. It creates an entire cohort of bright, motivated talent embedded across the company, learning by doing, and contributing from day one.

That scale changes everything:

• Ownership: Each intern has a real seat at the table. They’re not shadowing, they’re shipping.
• Impact: An intern’s work isn’t buried in a backlog. It lands in the hands of customers who run some of the world’s most complex, high-stakes systems.
• Visibility: Interns interact with founders, senior engineers, designers, and customers. Mentorship isn’t abstract but daily.

This isn’t an internship where you’ll spend 12 weeks building a side project that never ships. Our interns are woven directly into the workflows that power reliability for our customers.

What interns actually do at Rootly

So what does it look like when interns join Rootly?

• Engineering interns shipping critical workflows used by Fortune 500 teams during live incidents.
• Design interns prototyping new user experiences for how teams collaborate during outages.
• AI interns experimenting with copilots that help teams resolve issues faster and with more confidence.

In other words, interns aren’t here to help. They’re here to lead; it’s not a one-way street. Interns give back by challenging assumptions, introducing new tools, and asking the questions that keep us sharp.

In many cases, interns’ ideas spark changes that ripple across the entire company. That’s why we don’t just tolerate “fresh eyes”, we rely on them.

Looking ahead

Hiring  interns wasn’t an easy decision. It required bandwidth, planning, and a willingness to open our culture to a big new cohort all at once. But we’d make the decision again in a heartbeat.

For us, this isn’t just about filling short-term gaps. It’s about building the long-term future of reliability, here in Canada, with Canadian talent, trained in the realities of how companies actually keep systems running.

We’re excited to see what this group of interns builds, learns, and teaches us along the way.

Because at Rootly, we know one thing for certain: reliability isn’t just Rootly’s mission, it’s a global need.