Credits - Shivesh Gupta, B.Tech, Mechanical Engineering 2025

Where was your third-year summer internship? Domain, Company and City

My third-year internship was in the Domain of Software as a System Software Engineer with Sony RnD in the beautiful city of Tokyo, Japan.

Can you tell us about the work you were assigned during your internship? What were your responsibilities?

The internship was a corporate research role in which I worked on two projects using Kubernetes (K8s), a tool generally used to deploy software in production. My first project was peering into the inner workings of K8s and experimenting with using Web Assembly to improve the time it takes for applications to be up and running after the deployment is triggered. Being a corporate research role, there were naturally limited articles/resources to follow since this idea was conceptualised in 2023 and is still a work in progress. Another project used K8s with ROS application to deploy and control the ROS nodes on distributed systems. I was tasked with developing a no-code automation tool for ROS developers unfamiliar with the entire K8s thing.

Any skills or tools you felt were essential for your internship?

The thing with Sony was that although it had come for the Embedded System Role, they were expecting skills in the DevOps side of software development. I had a project and an internship from my second year where I worked on using Docker Containers and developed an automation(CI/CD) pipeline for deploying company applications hence, I think it helped in the profile match since it’s of primary importance for these Japanese companies. Moreover, before joining the internship, I had completed Coursera courses on RedHat Linux and Kubernetes, which helped me understand my internship tasks.

How is the work culture like at the company?

Sony, just like any other global company, had a very standard work week of 5 days, 8 hours per day. The culture in Sony, and especially RnD, is very independent, and you are responsible for planning out a path for your given problem statement, researching resources, and accomplishing the work. At the same time, there were daily standups to share pain points and progress, and you could approach your allocation mentor/manager at any time. There are incentives for overtime for Full-Time Roles, but as an intern, you were strongly discouraged. There are also good provisions for WFH, such as a minimum of 1-2 days in the office if your work does not require tool access.

How was your transition to the city, accommodation (PG, hostel, rented apartment, relative’s), food, and transportation?

I would greatly appreciate the smoothness with which Sony handles this internship aspect. Sony makes full arrangements for your VISA application, Japan flight and accommodation. They keep you promptly updated about the status of your application and also arrange for airport pickup to accommodate dropoff. The first day to the office was also accompanied for us to get accustomed to the biggest metro network in the world! The accommodation was a fully furnished 1 BHK apartment, so there was no hassle.

⁠Your personal goals and journey and how this internship shaped/affected the same.

I have been a tech guy since school and have continued the same in college. My personal goal, although it sounds a bit fancy for now, is to be a CTO for a Fortune 500 company (or preferably a company of my own). Hence, I strive to understand both the breadth and depth of different technologies present in the space. K8s as a technology is extremely vital to every single software company out there. Hence my hands-on experience with K8s in Sony was a great learning experience, very in line with my own growth plans.