Courtesy of Shubham Malhotra
- Shubham Malhotra is a software engineer at Amazon with experience at Microsoft and Salesforce.
- He has five proven strategies that he's used to land all of his Big Tech software engineering jobs.
- He emphasizes the importance of internships, tailored résumés, and job search timing for career success.
Shubham Malhotra's Big Tech journey began during his fifth semester at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), where he was juggling coursework with a co-op at a real estate-focused tech firm.
While gaining experience and refining his résumé, Malhotra — who grew up in New Delhi, moved to the US to study software engineering, and is now a software engineer at Amazon — applied to roles at top tech companies.
He landed internships at Salesforce in the summer of 2021 and at Amazon AWS in the fall of 2021. During his second internship, he applied for a full-time position at Microsoft through a job portal and ultimately secured an offer for 2022.
Malhotra stayed at Microsoft for two and a half years before leaving the company in November 2024, when he relocated to the Seattle area to join Amazon.
Here are five job-search strategies he employed to secure multiple offers from Big Tech companies.
1. Take initiative during internships
Malhotra believes that completing purposeful internships on systems-focused teams was a significant factor in his success. "Breaking into Big Tech is hardest at the beginning," he said. "For me, that breakthrough came via internships at Amazon and Salesforce, which gave me enough credibility to land my Microsoft offer."
Treating his internships like "engineering labs," Malhotra said he used these experiences to intentionally build up infrastructure, performance, and systems expertise far beyond surface-level coding.
"I wasn't just doing 'intern tasks' — I was already solving latency and error-tolerance issues that directly affected customers and operational SLAs," he said. "This was mostly driven by my own initiative, with support from my managers."
During his internships at Salesforce and Amazon, Malhotra would ask his manager and senior engineers, "What's a real reliability or latency problem on the critical path that no one has had time to fix yet?" From there, he'd volunteer to own a slice of it, then they'd scope it out together.
"Doing this complex problem-solving also helped give me great visibility within my teams," he said.
These early experiences enabled him to craft a résumé that showcased both internships and technical depth, which he believes was key to landing his Microsoft interview. Then, the work he did to secure his internship offers meant he'd already practiced for the big leagues.
"Because I'd already been preparing through prior internship interviews, I was technically and behaviorally ready to interview for full-time positions at top tech companies."
2. Write a résumé that works for both ATS and humans
Malhotra avoided generic buzzwords and focused on scale, reliability, and research contributions in his résumé. He also reverse-engineered company job descriptions to match his résumé with ATS filters.
"I used LaTeX via Overleaf to create a clean, technical résumé optimized for parsing and readability," he said.
Another one of his strategies was tailoring keywords for each role, emphasizing "cloud computing," "distributed systems," and "backend engineering" throughout the document. Malhotra also ensured that his résumé bullets focused on measurable outcomes, rather than just effort.
"Every bullet emphasized not just tasks but quantifiable impact — like "reduced data latency by 40%" and "streamlined workflow to cut API response time by 25%."
3. Time the market as a new grad
Malhotra wanted to ensure that he applied for Big Tech roles at the right time. "As a fresh graduate, I learned that timing your job search is just as critical as skills," he said.
He began his application process early, around August, when most tech companies kick off full-time recruitment.
"From August to mid-November, companies fill the bulk of their head count for the next year," Malhotra said. "After a brief halt, a second hiring window opens between February and April of the following year."
Malhotra signed his Microsoft offer in October 2021. For his most recent move to Amazon as an experienced hire, his offer was also finalized in October with a November start date.
4. Scale interview prep to the role's specific challenges
Malhotra prepped for coding interviews using LeetCode, CodeChef, and HackerRank, identifying weak areas and tracking performance.
For behavioral rounds, he followed the STAR method and mapped his stories to leadership principles. He also ramped up his preparation for interviews using white papers, books, and real-world architecture case studies to help him discuss company-specific challenges.
5. Don't take shortcuts
Malhotra said he chose his college specifically for its co-op structure, helping him gain early real-world experience and build a strong US-based engineering track record.
Feeling confident in this background, he decided to try an out-of-the-box approach to his job search. Instead of relying on referrals, Malhotra cold-applied and followed up via LinkedIn with tailored pitches.
His cold outreach strategy centered on emailing recruiters with short, personalized pitches that included how he found their contact information, a brief introduction of himself, a clear ask to review his résumé for specific roles, and a note on why he was excited about the company.
His "short, personalized pitch" strategy played the biggest role in his Amazon transition.
"I leaned heavily on concise, personalized emails and LinkedIn messages to recruiters, plus a few warm intros," Malhotra said. "Most of my serious interview loops, including the one that led to my current offer, started from that outreach rather than just submitting an application and hoping."
He also developed personal projects, such as a handwriting recognition tool utilizing AWS Textract, which he hosted on the cloud with authentication and shared functionality.
"I treated job hunting like system design — mapping companies, targeting roles, cold emailing with personalized subject lines and value propositions," Malhotra said. "I always kept a ready-to-send project repo or research paper link handy to prove my value."
Malhotra is happy at Amazon
He's working on deep-seated infrastructure problems that he believes have a real impact. "It's exactly the kind of work I wanted when I first set my sights on Big Tech," he said.
If he had to look for another job in today's market, he says he'd use the same five strategies, but with one additional point.
"I'd run the same system again — just with a bit more compounding from public work and relationships," Malhotra said. "I'd add an even stronger emphasis on building signal in public while things are going well — open-source contributions, writing, small talks, and a tighter network of engineers and hiring managers. Those make your résumé, outreach, and timing work even harder for you when the market tightens."
Read the original article on Business Insider
