Amazon Development Centre, India

Basic Information

Name: Swadhin Dash
Curriculum: EE BTech
Year of Study: 4th
Company/University of Internship: Amazon Development Centre, India
Role during Internship: Software Development Engineer - 1 Intern
Year of Internship (eg. '24 Summers, '23 Winters): ‘24 Summers
Mode of Internship (Online/Offline/Hybrid): Offline
Duration of Internship: 8 weeks

Getting into the Internship:

What specific domain or field did you target to get an internship in?

I targeted SDE and Quant roles during my internship season.

What resources did you utilize to prepare for the tests/interviews?

I prepared for SDE using Leetcode problem sets and learnt the fundamentals of DSA from Geeks for Geeks. For Quant I prepared from the book - A Practical Guide To Quantitative Finance Interviews by Xinfeng Zhou

Can you elaborate on your interview and the type of questions which were asked?

In my Amazon interview there were 4 questions asked within a time frame of 1 hour. First question was a tough binary search application problem, second was on topological sort, the third was on binary trees and fourth was a guided problem where the interviewer asked me to make a red black tree from scratch. There was no HR round involved but the interviewer asked some basic HR questions within the 1 Hour in under 5 minutes

Were there any significant roadblocks or challenges that you encountered during the internship application and selection process? If so, how did you navigate or overcome them?

N/A

How did you handle any rejections that you faced (If any) during the internship application process?

I was rejected by Graviton despite my interview going perfect. It was not much of a big deal to me because I hadn’t invested much time into Quant, thus I was fine with it.

During the internship:

What was your specific profile or project topic during the internship?

I was an SDE-1 intern at Amazon. I did 3 projects, one major and two minor tasks, all of which were involved with backend development. I am not allowed to share much about the exact project topic because it’s not a customer facing feature and is confidential but I designed a workflow using AWS services like ECS, SQS, SNS, Lambda and DynamoDB that reduced a specific workflow duration from a period of 1 week to almost instantaneous. The minor tasks involved JDK17 migration of packages and implementation of Java Spring Controllers

How would you describe your overall experience as an intern?

My teammates at Amazon were very welcoming and cooperative. I had heard a lot of negative reviews about Amazon from outsiders about the work life balance and work culture. But I didn’t see even a slightest bit of the toxicity in the culture. Everyone there were so invested in the lives of us interns, helped us with whatever doubts we had, gave us ample time to learn AWS services, etc. Overall I loved my work (because thankfully it wasn’t frontend development :p) and Amazon’s culture. I believe Big Tech MNC’s that are based in India have a very Indian touch to them in terms of culture and inclusivity and a very Western touch in terms of luxury, money

Could you provide insights into the organizational culture of the company/university and what your peers were like?

• Amazon has a very Leadership principles oriented culture. You can read up about them online. They are a set of principles that they judge every employee on and all their technical work focusses on bringing out one of them otherwise the work wouldn’t be considered strong enough. Amazon has a very customer centric approach in everything they do. Just saying it won’t make sense but when you actually start any project you will realize how at each and every stage of the process customers are at the top of the hierarchy. Other than this, they sure know how to throw a party ;) • All of my peers were very smart SDE themselves with years of experience in the market and helped me a lot gain skills throughout with ample life lessons. But they did know how to strike a nice work life balance and never discounted the need for a hard party. Going in there I realized being smart is one thing but in spaces of big tech, everyone there is too strong with their intellect. It all comes down to your experience in the market and how well you are able to understand it. It’s no longer an inside-IIT race of being the best in the class but it’s more of working together to make your class best.

Were there any networking opportunities or professional connections that you established during the internship?

I met a number of employees and interns and the networking possibilities are huge. There are people who have worked in all spheres ranging from Investment banking, ML, etc. and are now working as an SDE or in a management role at Amazon. Got to learn a lot of stuff on how to shape your career as a person, put behind all the IIT I had in me and rather focus on shaping myself beyond the JEE euphoria. The most important thing when you do an intern is go ahead and talk to people about their life, how they worked through from their beginnings to where they are right now. You will get to learn a lot and it will humble you.

After the Internship:

• Yes, I would absolutely recommend someone interested in pure SDE roles to work at Amazon. You would get to learn a lot about how Amazon dominates the scope of DevOps and Cloud solutions and you will get to interact with seasoned developers. • The networking opportunity is huge and its endless learning of how the market functions and how companies like Amazon manage to stay at top of the e-commerce business with the way it functions, their principles and how you can instill those principles in your day to day life to make it 10x more productive and guided.

What are you currently involved in or pursuing following the completion of your internship?

• Presently, for the next few days I’ll spend time at home, relax and gear up for the placement season coming up. Start working on placement resume and start actively working towards finalizing a BTP.

In what ways has the internship influenced or impacted your current activities and future endeavors?

• Technically my internship has just given me motivation to work and improve myself. Get to learn a number of stuff I never knew about. But college life and dilemmas like BTP, RnD, placements and other stuff are very independent of outside world. We deal with much smaller problems. It’s just the work ethics that continue with you minus a sleek macbook pro :p