{"id":39939,"date":"2025-12-02T10:22:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T10:22:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/a-software-engineer-who-landed-roles-at-amazon-microsoft-and-salesforce-shares-his-5-tips-for-getting-hired\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T10:22:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T10:22:07","slug":"a-software-engineer-who-landed-roles-at-amazon-microsoft-and-salesforce-shares-his-5-tips-for-getting-hired","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/usa\/a-software-engineer-who-landed-roles-at-amazon-microsoft-and-salesforce-shares-his-5-tips-for-getting-hired\/","title":{"rendered":"A software engineer who landed roles at Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce shares his 5 tips for getting hired"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.insider.com\/692dd907e1a9cbb014df4bae?format=jpeg\" alt=\"headshot of a man in a dark shirt\"\/><figcaption>Shubham Malhotra.<\/p>\n<p>Courtesy of Shubham Malhotra<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<ul>\n<li>Shubham Malhotra is a software engineer at Amazon with experience at Microsoft and Salesforce.<\/li>\n<li>He has five proven strategies that he&#039;s used to land all of his Big Tech software engineering jobs.<\/li>\n<li>He emphasizes the importance of internships, tailored r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, and job search timing for career success.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Shubham Malhotra&#039;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.<\/p>\n<p>While gaining experience and refining his r\u00e9sum\u00e9, Malhotra \u2014 who grew up in New Delhi, moved to the US to study software engineering, and is now a software engineer at Amazon \u2014 applied to roles at top tech companies.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Here are five job-search strategies he employed to secure multiple offers from Big Tech companies.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>1. Take initiative during internships<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Malhotra believes that completing purposeful internships on systems-focused teams was a significant factor in his success. &quot;Breaking into Big Tech is hardest at the beginning,&quot; he said. &quot;For me, that breakthrough came via internships at Amazon and Salesforce, which gave me enough credibility to land my Microsoft offer.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Treating his internships like &quot;engineering labs,&quot; Malhotra said he used these experiences to intentionally build up infrastructure, performance, and systems expertise far beyond surface-level coding.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I wasn&#039;t just doing &#039;intern tasks&#039; \u2014 I was already solving latency and error-tolerance issues that directly affected customers and operational SLAs,&quot; he said. &quot;This was mostly driven by my own initiative, with support from my managers.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>During his internships at Salesforce and Amazon, Malhotra would ask his manager and senior engineers, &quot;What&#039;s a real reliability or latency problem on the critical path that no one has had time to fix yet?&quot; From there, he&#039;d volunteer to own a slice of it, then they&#039;d scope it out together.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Doing this complex problem-solving also helped give me great visibility within my teams,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>These early experiences enabled him to craft a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 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&#039;d already practiced for the big leagues.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Because I&#039;d already been preparing through prior internship interviews, I was technically and behaviorally ready to interview for full-time positions at top tech companies.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>2. Write a r\u00e9sum\u00e9 that works for both ATS and humans<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Malhotra avoided generic buzzwords and focused on scale, reliability, and research contributions in his r\u00e9sum\u00e9. He also reverse-engineered company job descriptions to match his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 with ATS filters.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I used LaTeX via Overleaf to create a clean, technical r\u00e9sum\u00e9 optimized for parsing and readability,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>Another one of his strategies was tailoring keywords for each role, emphasizing &quot;cloud computing,&quot; &quot;distributed systems,&quot; and &quot;backend engineering&quot; throughout the document. Malhotra also ensured that his r\u00e9sum\u00e9 bullets focused on measurable outcomes, rather than just effort.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Every bullet emphasized not just tasks but quantifiable impact \u2014 like &quot;reduced data latency by 40%&quot; and &quot;streamlined workflow to cut API response time by 25%.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>3. Time the market as a new grad<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Malhotra wanted to ensure that he applied for Big Tech roles at the right time. &quot;As a fresh graduate, I learned that timing your job search is just as critical as skills,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>He began his application process early, around August, when most tech companies kick off full-time recruitment.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;From August to mid-November, companies fill the bulk of their head count for the next year,&quot; Malhotra said. &quot;After a brief halt, a second hiring window opens between February and April of the following year.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>4. Scale interview prep to the role&#039;s specific challenges<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>Malhotra prepped for coding interviews using LeetCode, CodeChef, and HackerRank, identifying weak areas and tracking performance.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<h2><strong>5. Don&#039;t take shortcuts<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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 r\u00e9sum\u00e9 for specific roles, and a note on why he was excited about the company.<\/p>\n<p>His &quot;short, personalized pitch&quot; strategy played the biggest role in his Amazon transition.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I leaned heavily on concise, personalized emails and LinkedIn messages to recruiters, plus a few warm intros,&quot; Malhotra said. &quot;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.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I treated job hunting like system design \u2014 mapping companies, targeting roles, cold emailing with personalized subject lines and value propositions,&quot; Malhotra said. &quot;I always kept a ready-to-send project repo or research paper link handy to prove my value.&quot;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Malhotra is happy at Amazon<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>He&#039;s working on deep-seated infrastructure problems that he believes have a real impact. &quot;It&#039;s exactly the kind of work I wanted when I first set my sights on Big Tech,&quot; he said.<\/p>\n<p>If he had to look for another job in today&#039;s market, he says he&#039;d use the same five strategies, but with one additional point.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I&#039;d run the same system again \u2014 just with a bit more compounding from public work and relationships,&quot; Malhotra said. &quot;I&#039;d add an even stronger emphasis on building signal in public while things are going well \u2014 open-source contributions, writing, small talks, and a tighter network of engineers and hiring managers. Those make your r\u00e9sum\u00e9, outreach, and timing work even harder for you when the market tightens.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Read the original article on Business Insider<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shubham Malhotra. 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&#039;s used to land all of his Big Tech software engineering jobs. He emphasizes the importance of internships, tailored r\u00e9sum\u00e9s, and job search timing for career success. Shubham Malhotra&#039;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":39940,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-39939","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39939\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/39940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/agooka.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}