Amazon Internship Experience FAQs
By: Suras Nayak
Tags: Internship Experience, Amazon, FAQ, Internships

What can we do during the days before our internship starts ?

As a start you should try to get familiar with Webdevelopment and get your hands dirty with some frontend and backend technologies like Java and JavaScript. Specifically try to explore the frameworks like Java Spring, React, Angular etc.

For more info you can refer to this article which tells more in depth about this : https://medium.com/@surasnayak/things-i-wish-i-knew-before-joining-amazon-b49fdeac6031

What is the general tech stack used in Amazon ?

Again refer to my other article to get more info. Link : https://medium.com/@surasnayak/things-i-wish-i-knew-before-joining-amazon-b49fdeac6031

How are the work timings ?

There is no such fixed timings you are flexible to work as per your convenience but you need to make sure that you attend all your meetings and discussions. So set your work timings appropriately.

There is no such norm that you have to work 10–12 hours a day. But as per the work load and deadlines you may have to add extra work hours if and when required. As a beginner since we are here to explore the projects and learn so yes as an Intern we may have to spend some extra hours daily and on weekends to manage the work and deliver projects.

Think of this time as an investment into your experience. As you get more and more familiarised with things eventually your work timings will go back to normal.

What all equipments we will get during our internship ?

As an SDE internships you will get a laptop and VPN keys which will be used for your daily work. Mostly you will be getting a MacBook. You will be using your VPN keys to login into the Amazon network.

Because of the lockdown getting the delivery of your work equipment does take time so do be patient.

You may reimburse you WFH setup, but it can totally vary. There are some terms and conditions for those.

How are we evaluated in the end of the internships ?

You should be able to successfully deliver your tasks and projects. At the end of the internship there will be a debrief round, you will have to prepare a document where you will write about your internhsips and all the deliverables you succeded. Your manager your mentor will present your case to a Bar Raiser also refered to as BR (The person who will evalutate your profile, your tasks) who will decide wether you get the PPO or not.

This is genrally refred to as the BR round. It is the most important round which will decide your PPO.

For SDE interns there might be a PPI (Pre placement interview) during the end of your internship before your BR round. This will be similar to your actual interview that you gave during the internship hiring process. So the preparation will be similar to what you did for your internhsip hiring interviews.

When is the PPO results declared ?

Once your BR round is finished and the decision is taken you will get to know about the result from the hiring team. It may be before your intenrhsip has ended or after. It depends upn when your BR round was done and many such other parameters.

How does your interview timeline look like ?

I will be writing another detailed blog to explain this. This is really important and I would like to cover this is depth.

How to evaluate your self and keep in touch with manager and other team mates ?

Regularly have 1–1 meetings with your Manager and Mentor. This will help you assess what have you done till now and what can you improve upon. You can also discuss any concerns that you might have. You can ask your doubts regarding tech, or if you are stuck somewhere or if you want to just debug some problems together.

Also communicate with other memebers of your team. Keep asking questions. You will have alot of doubts, so try asking whomever you can in your team. Don’t expect that all your problems will get solved immediately but yes you will get a direction to solve it.

What kind of work is expected from an SDE Intern ?

The work you get varies a lot based on your team. You might get some small tasks in a large project, or a medium sized proejct that you have to implmenet from front end to back end. You may also get tasks related to implmenting new features in an existsing large scale project. You may be also given POC tasks where you have to come with a working solution to a problem statement. Your tasks may be purely backend or purely frontend or mixture of both. Your work will be distributed such that all the data points like coding, problem solving, Data structures and algorithms are covered.

Your projects are assigned to you by your manager and mentor, mostly you dont have to choose the project for yourself atleast not in the initial stages.

I hear people say that Amazon has a lot of internal tools. Can you elaborate?

Yes, so most of the tools that you will use in your day to day development work at Amazon are all internal Amazon facing. The build system, the code pipelines, the development setup, the code base, also some of the frameworks wrapper are all internal facing. This is equivalent of saying that if you face any problems with these tools you cannot use stackoverflow to solve them.

Just to list out a few :

You use Github to store your projects codebase, Amazon has its own code base. You use jenkins for your development management, Amazon has its own. You setup your projects in your linux or mac environment, Amazon has its own environment. You use Java Spring directly, Amazon has its own wrappers on top. You use Medium blogs to learn and look up for tech blogs, Amazon has its own. And the best one you use stackoverflow to solve your problems, Amazon has its own internal stackoverflow.

Learning to familiarize with this new Amazon ecosystem is a challenging part of your internship. But don’t worry the Amazon developers community is there to help you out.

What mistakes to avoid during the internisp ?

Again this is a very open ended question. I will do a seperate blog post to cover this in depth.