A software engineer who landed roles at Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce shares his 5 tips for getting hired

Shubham Malhotra’s path went from a co-op during his fifth semester at RIT to internships at Salesforce and Amazon AWS in 2021, a full-time Microsoft offer that same year, and a move to Amazon in November 2024. He credits the sequence less to luck and more to five habits he repeated at each step, which the piece walks through with his own numbers and phrasing.

The strategies aren’t abstract advice. Malhotra names the exact questions he asked senior engineers during internships, the tools he used to write his résumé, and the outreach template that led to his Amazon offer.

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• During internships, he treated the work as “engineering labs” rather than intern tasks: he’d ask managers directly, “What’s a real reliability or latency problem on the critical path that no one has had time to fix yet?” and volunteer to own a slice of it.
• His résumé was built in LaTeX via Overleaf, with keywords like “cloud computing,” “distributed systems,” and “backend engineering” tuned against each job description, and bullets written around measurable outcomes (“reduced data latency by 40%”) instead of listed tasks.
• He timed his applications to two annual hiring windows he’d learned about: August through mid-November for the bulk of new-grad headcount, then a second window from February to April. Both his Microsoft and Amazon offers landed in October.
• Interview prep split by round: LeetCode, CodeChef, and HackerRank for coding, and the STAR method mapped to leadership principles for behavioral questions, backed by white papers and architecture case studies for company-specific topics.
• Instead of relying on referrals, he cold-emailed recruiters with short, personalized pitches: how he found their contact, a quick self-introduction, a specific ask to review his résumé, and a reason for his interest in the company. He calls this outreach the biggest factor in his Amazon move.
• Asked what he’d change if job-hunting again today, he’d keep the same five strategies but add more public signal ahead of time: open-source contributions, writing, small talks, and a wider network of engineers and hiring managers built before he needs it.