Internship Experiences at Amazon

Amazon came to our campus around October for taking interns for the Software Development role. Generally, they take two rounds for their summer intern hiring. The first one is an online test consisting of MCQs related to code debugging, coding questions related to data structures, work style assessment based on Amazon’s leadership principle, and Logical ability questions. Once it is cleared, you get an invite for a one-to-one technical interview round in which they ask questions based on coding. In our case, two questions were asked from this and the others were related to the resume.

Arpit’s Experience

The first time amazon contacted me after my confirmation mail was around February when I got a message that a delivery was coming to my home. I ignored the mail like any other random spam message. Later on the day, I received a package filled with goodies to welcome me to Amazon! I was surprised and overwhelmed by the gesture shown by the company for a summer intern. Later I also received IT accessories and goodies just before the start of my internship.

As it was my first time working in an industrial environment, I was quite nervous before the start of the internship. I was looking around for interns' experiences available online and trying to figure out what kind of work was required at Amazon. However, I would advise not to worry about this before the start of the internship as every team at Amazon works on different sets of problems and in different paradigms.

I was a part of Amazon web services(AWS), an Amazon cloud computing platform which is a world leader in cloud services. I worked on Amazon elastic search service which is a large-scale distributed search engine used for analytics and log collection. My team mainly operated on the resiliency of the elastic search service where they provide solutions to make the service more stable. I was assigned a mentor and an onboarding buddy for helping me out in my internship.

Since the internship was virtual, the first week involved setting up the IT accessories, watching ramp-up videos, and also establishing the development environment for the work. During my time, my team was migrating to another platform so I faced a lot of difficulties while setting up the system. However, my team was really helpful and everyone came forward to help me whenever I was stuck with any issues in the setup. I was also told about my internship project and a set of milestones they are expecting to achieve through the project in the first week.

At Amazon, I didn’t have any fixed time slot to work, though the team generally stays online between 11 am to 5 pm. We had a daily standup with the team to discuss their blockers and what they will be working on. We also had a lot of fun and learning activities every week. Amazon had a healthy work culture in place, I used to discuss my problems not only with the mentor and my team members but also with people outside and sometimes people working from abroad as well. Everyone was really helpful and all I needed to do was to put up my doubt and set a meeting and they tried to help in the best way they can. The only thing that you need is to be proactive and also be responsible in the work that you do.

Finally, I would say that I had a very good time at Amazon and I got exposure to how work is done in an industrial setting from discussing ideas at the initial stage to pushing a production-ready code!

Sudheesh's Experience

I was part of the ML platform wing of Amazon’s RBS-Tech team which deals with the development of text-attribute extraction models and their deployment. The RBS-Tech Team as a whole aims to improve the user experience on Amazon’s Online shopping platform, by finding inconsistencies in product descriptions, images, etc.

We were provided all the required IT assets beforehand including a Macbook Pro. The first step was to set up the laptop with Amazon’s internal VPN’s and all the major development work is done on their Cloud desktops. Once the IT setup was complete I was introduced to my team by my manager and all the members were welcoming and helpful. Each intern was assigned a mentor who would closely work with us throughout the internship and guide us in our decision-making process. The first two weeks majorly consist of learning Amazon’s internal tools for development and continuous deployment.

My project was to automate the deployment of the NER machine learning models to Amazon’s internal model management/hosting framework. The project needed the knowledge of Java and a Java framework called Dagger. The project also relied on AWS(Amazon Web Services), Amazon’s cloud computing platform. Before joining the company, I was a novice Java developer and had neither heard about Dagger nor did I have any experience with AWS. I was initially confused a bit about being able to learn what was required in such a short span of time. These are the challenges a software developer has to face and should be prepared to face when they go to the industry. I was able to put in the effort and finish learning in time. Moreover, in Amazon, there is a huge emphasis on its Leadership Principles, and our actions were judged with these principles in mind.

The workload at Amazon is also manageable and one can expect to have a good work-life balance, as the team assigns projects which can be done within a 2-month time frame. There is no specific work time and you can work whenever you’re free as long as you are producing the deliverables. We had a daily standup at 4 pm to give updates on the work and discuss any blockers which we were facing. All the teammates including our manager and mentor are both very supportive and approachable. I still remember having 1 am chats with my mentor, as we both preferred to work at night. We also got to write production-ready code with very good code quality.

The internship was not just about work. Amazon organised an entire day as Intern’s day which was filled with fun and informative sessions. Our team also arranged team lunches, where we had fun activities and ate together, the money for which was fully reimbursed. Amazon also has an Intern’s Circle program, which was headed by a former intern, now a full-time employee. The sessions were very useful as you get to work with fellow interns and also get valuable advice from the mentor of the session who walked on the same path as us.

During the final week, we had to prepare a project design document and a self-review form, based on which the final recruitment decision was taken by the manager and a third person called Bar raiser. In conclusion, I will definitely recommend everyone to give a shot at Amazon. You get an opportunity to work with very smart people and there is a lot which you can learn from them. The mere fact that the code you write affects the lives of millions around the world, should be enough to excite one. Lastly, I would like to thank the CDC and Ajin Sir for their efforts to bring such a good opportunity and giving me a chance to have a really good lifelong experience.