swe habu internship - summer'23

I am a computer science grad with a specialization in privacy. I am passionate about all things software engineering and its intersection with responsible, anonymous and private technology. I do not have an inclination towards ML. So the next logical step was to focus on data-intensive areas which involve humans. In comes AdTech, MarTech and FinTech. My keen interest in working on data-intensive application lead me the incredible, hot and upcoming privacy-oriented industry of clean-rooms. To put in simple words:

“You got data? I got data. I don’t trust you, and you don’t trust me. So let’s do one thing, let’s bring our data into an isolated environment where neither of us have access to each other’s data. And most importantly, let’s draw insights from a combination of this data.”

This isolated data collaboration environment is called a Clean Room.

To give you a brief idea about what it means technologically, Habu, an industry leader in the data collaboration domain, explains their architecture in Figure 1.

Fortunately, even in this dire market, Habu Inc, took a chance on me and brought me in as an intern to help build out a POC for their privacy oriented clean rooms. Over the course of summer'23, I was tasked to research different approaches, come up with a design document for the product and eventually build it out. And honestly, it's the most fun I'd had in a while. Not just because of the work, but more importantly, the people at Habu, who were incredibly encouraging, supportive and amazing.

We built out a Differentially Private clean room framework, which included a budget accounting framework, refresh conditions and support for extensibility. While building this framework for the POC, I gained a ton of experience with microservice architecture, working across different codebases and teams. All in all, an incredible time and experience as an intern.