Summer Engineering Internship – neoDAVE: Neo4j Dependency and Vulnerability Explorer

About Neo4j:

Neo4j is the leader in Graph Database & Analytics, helping organizations uncover hidden patterns and relationships across billions of data connections deeply, easily, and quickly. Customers use Neo4j to gain a deeper understanding of their business and reveal new ways of solving their most pressing problems. Over 84% of Fortune 100 companies use Neo4j, along with a vibrant community of 250,000+ developers, data scientists, and architects across the globe.

At Neo4j, we’re proud to build the technology that powers breakthrough solutions for our customers. These solutions have helped NASA get to Mars two years earlier, broke the Panama Papers for the ICIJ, and are helping Transport for London to cut congestion by 10% and save $750M a year. Some of our other notable customers include Intuit, Lockheed Martin, Novartis, UBS, and Walmart. 

Neo4j experienced rapid growth this year as organizations looking to deploy generative AI (GenAI) recognized graph databases as essential for improving it’s accuracy, transparency, and explainability. Growth was further fueled by enterprise demand for Neo4j’s cloud offering and partnerships with leading cloud hyperscalers and ecosystem leaders. Learn more at neo4j.com and follow us on LinkedIn.

  Our Vision: 

At Neo4j, we have always strived to help the world make sense of data.  

As business, society and knowledge become increasingly connected, our technology promotes innovation by helping organizations to find and understand data relationships. We created, drive and lead the graph database category, and we’re disrupting how organizations leverage their data to innovate and stay competitive.

The Role:

About the Neo4j Customer Support Operations Team:

Neo4j Customer Support Operations is a highly effective part of Neo4j’s Field Engineering organisation and provides a key foundation for the long-term success and satisfaction of our growing customer base. Neo4j Customer Support Operations serves as an interface between traditional Customer Support and Product Engineering teams to develop subject matter expertise within Customer Support, as well as developing highly-customised tools and processes to accelerate and enhance our overall service delivery.

Project Outline:

Neo4j Server is a Java application that is built from many individual Java packages and these dependencies can come from both internal and external sources.

neoDAVE is a web based system that the Customer Support Operations Team built to allow the whole of the Neo4j organisation to easily understand:

• The package hierarchy Neo4j Server is built from
• Where publicly reported vulnerabilities affect the packages and dependencies
• Differences in vulnerabilities a custom might observe between two different product versions

In its initial implementation, the system would find the information from scanning the Neo4j Server project pom.xml maven manifest and persisting the version and package hierarchy inside a Neo4j database. Then these specific package versions were checked against public CVE databases to identify vulnerabilities.

After this initial success, a number of possible developments were identified:

• Cover the whole suite of Neo4j products, not just Neo4j Server
• Identify and display products that are bundled in the Neo4j Server releases
• Integrate with our Snyk vulnerability scanner which has an API where we can get pre-made scanning results rather than performing our own scans.
• Integrate with CODEX rather than only having a separate web application.
  CODEX is our bespoke, in-house developed support diagnostics system that we use extensively within both Customer Support and Product Engineering.

We would like to offer an opportunity to reimagine and extend this widely-used system, exploring the opportunities listed above whilst bringing some fresh thinking and innovation to the project.

There may be some other Support Operations intern projects occurring during this summer. Of course, we will be very happy to discuss working across multiple projects if there are specific areas of interest that you would like to explore; or, where collaboration with other interns would be beneficial.

Key Skills:

This project can be seen as either a continuation of the existing code, or a rewrite.

The current code will serve as a good starting point to either continue extending, or to refresh what is currently there.

It’s important to note that we are looking to move this system forward in terms of features and functionality, so this should not be seen as just building a new UI.

The ideal candidate for this internship would be experienced in, or ready to begin working with the following technologies. For any Neo4j-developed frameworks and technologies, assistance and access to the development teams will be provided so prior experience with these technologies is beneficial but not required.

For frontend systems:

• Typescript / Javascript
• React framework
• Neo4j Design Library (NDL, “needle”) frontend component design library
• Tanstack / React Router
• Tanstack / React Query

When developing backend systems, we prefer building on our common technology stack:

• Java
• Spring Boot framework
• Python, in some specific circumstances
• FastAPI
• AWS Lambdas
• Neo4j Graph Database
• Okta single sign-on authentication

Project Outline:

• Familiarise yourself with the historic neoDAVE implementation
• Frontend UI application
• Backend REST API server
• Backend Analysis system
• Understand how the information is historically visualised to end users
• Design a UI to improve displaying this information
• Familiarise yourself with Snyk APIs and test gathering vulnerabilities from these sources
• Gather package version and bundling information 
• Persist version, bundling and vulnerability information to graph database
• Build the new UI to present the improved information to users

We really want to ensure your time with us is both engaging and entertaining, so we are always open to discussions regarding any specific areas we can focus on during your internship which help achieve your goals as well as ours.

When applying for this position, please write:
- If there is one project that interests you more than the others
- If you are mostly specialized in front-end or back-end development or if you are equally interested in both

Location:

• Malmö, Sweden
  Working in the office with our Product Engineering teams.
  Regular interactions with Customer Support Operations Team mentors both in-person in Malmö, and remotely.

Why Join Neo4j?

Neo4j is, without question, the most popular graph database in the world. We have customers in every industry globally, and our products are a proven product/market fit. Joining our team is an opportunity to shape the future of data and analytics. Below are just a few exciting facts about Neo4j. 

• Neo4j is one of the fastest-scaling technology companies in this industry. It recently surpassed $200M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), doubling its ARR over the past three years. 
• Raised the biggest funding round in database history ($325M Series F). Backed by world-class investors like Eurazeo, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Inovia Capital, Neo4j has raised over $600M in funding and is currently valued at over $2Bn. This puts Neo4j among the most well-funded database companies in history.
• 84% of the Fortune 100 and 58% of the Fortune 500 use Neo4j. Examples include Boston Scientific, BT Group, Caterpillar, Cisco, Comcast, Department for Education UK, eBay, NBC News, Novo Nordisk, Worldline, and others. 
• Co-founder and CEO Emil Eifrem has built an amazing culture that prides itself on relationships, inclusiveness, innovation, and customer success.
• Countless industry awards. Massive enterprises and individual developers/data scientists love Neo4j. A strong sense of community and ecosystem is built around the platform.
• A recent Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study cited Neo4j as delivering 417% ROI to customers. 
• Neo4j was named as a Visionary in the 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud Database Management Systems among 19 other recognized global DBMS vendors. Neo4j was also ranked as a Strong Performer among 14 top vendors in The Forrester Wave™: Vector Databases, Q3 2024.

Research shows that members of underrepresented communities are less likely to apply for jobs when they don’t meet all the qualifications. If this is part of the reason you hesitate to apply, we’d encourage you to reconsider and give us the opportunity to review your application. At Neo4j, we are committed to building awareness and helping to improve these issues. 

One of our central objectives is to provide an inclusive, diverse, and equitable workplace for everyone to develop their potential and have a positive, career-defining experience. We look forward to receiving your application.

Neo4j Values:

Neo4j is a Silicon Valley company with a Swedish soul. We foster collaboration and each of us is empowered to contribute and put our innovative stamp on projects. We hire candidates who reflect the following Neo4j core values:

(we)-[:VALUE]->(relationships)
(we)-[:FOCUS_ON]->(userSuccess)
(we)-[:THRIVE_IN]->(:Culture {type: [‘Open’, ‘Inclusive’]})
(we)-[:ASSUME]->(:Intent {direction:’Positive’})
(we)-[:WELCOME]->(:Discussions {nature: ‘IntellectuallyHonest’})
(we)-[:DELIVER_ON]->(ourCommitments) 

Neo4j is committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. Please read the privacy notice regarding Neo4j's recruitment process to understand how we will handle the personal data that you provide. 

More information at www.neo4j.com.