From June 6th to August 26th, I interned at Amazon’s Alexa AI organization. More specifically, I worked within an internship team in the NLU (Natural Language Understanding) portion of the Alexa org. For the first blog post, I think it would be beneficial to talk about the hiring process for the internship, what the internship experience was like, and my final thoughts about it as I return to work for Amazon after receiving my degree.
I first applied to Amazon for their Software Development Engineer Internship position in October 2021. After a period of time, they send me an online assessment (OA) that consisted of an easy and a medium leetcode-styled question that I needed to solve within 70 minutes. Once that was completed, I was invited to complete the second portion of the OA, which was a work simulation based on Amazon’s leadership principles. I was told that I passed the OA and that the final interview was to be slotted at a later date. I did almost miss of interview by an hour because I didn’t receive the notification for the meeting in my email for a couple of days, and I decided randomly to check my email. Overall, it wasn’t the greatest experience, but I did manage to make it into the meeting, do a problem based on arrays, and then I received the offer in December of 2021.
For my internship, I worked on a portion of the Astro project, which is Amazon’s household robot with Alexa built-in. I was tasked with another intern to implement a game with the robot while implementing movements from Astro. The first day was pretty rough in terms of getting all of the IT material ready for the device, but then the first couple of weeks were pretty relaxed with me working on their learning modules. I also worked on a few custom skills that involved Alexa, and I learned how to use AWS services in conjunction with my project.
The entire internship was remote, which had its upsides and downsides. Not having a commute is extremely nice, which also allows you to reclaim that lost time to do what you want to do. A big downside would be not having access to people in-person, especially if you’re working on something time-sensitive. Networking also felt limited by remote working, since I was usually only talking with the people on my team. I think hybrid work would be the ideal middle ground for these concerns of mine, but that ultimately depend on if that’s an option for your team.
About 10 days after I completed my internship, I received an offer from Amazon asking me to return. I’m happy with the compensation package they gave me, so I intend to return to Amazon after I complete my degree at the end of this quarter. For anyone that wants to aim for Amazon, I would suggest getting some personal projects under your belt, and I would also suggest grinding leetcode questions on a daily basis to prep for the OA and final interview. The best channel for understanding leetcode solutions would be Neetcode, and following his Neetcode 150 question list which you can find here (https://neetcode.io/).
