PayPal Risk is a very dynamic and challenging technical environment.  There are quite a few opportunities for an intern to come in and learn a lot about PayPal technologies and at the same time contribute in a meaningful way.

Here are some potential task that an Intern may be assigned to.

1.  Monitoring tools are critical part of running technology based organization but yet is ignored due to various reasons.  There is an opportunity for an intern to design and implement a monitoring system that serves various needs.
2. Work on Innovation projects. PayPal Risk constantly is re-inventing itself and there is a great opportunity for an intern to understand the financial risk business. Think like the "bad guy" and build systems that stop them from commiting fraud on the site.
3. Set up daily builds in Hudson(http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Meet+Hudson ) for existing C++ components, so that we can have continuous integration and immediate feedback on quality. Integration with current PayPal build systems whenever applicable.
5. Help building an automation framework can exercise and load test our C++ based synchronous and asynchronous systems.
6. Are you the visual kind of person ?  Do you want to look breadth rather than depth ? We have a job for you. How about creating Documents/Diagrams for of some of complex and critical flows in Risk. Create Visio diagrams, Class diagrams, Entity relationships.
7.  Do you want to learn about the importance of various datasources to the PayPal Risk business ? You can do that by create a complete data map of Risk data sources on the Live PayPal site,  off line datasources etc.  Create data paths from Live to Terradata and back.
8. How about squashing a few bugs and significantly improving the PayPal customer experience ? You can be direct influencing some user behavior. Pretty interesting!!