According to Business Insider, software engineer Shubham Malhotra, who grew up in New Delhi and studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology, has landed roles at Amazon, Microsoft, and Salesforce. His Big Tech journey began with a co-op in his fifth semester in 2021, leading to consecutive internships at Salesforce in the summer and Amazon AWS in the fall of that same year. He then secured a full-time offer at Microsoft in October 2021, where he worked for two and a half years before leaving in November 2024 to relocate to Seattle and join Amazon. Malhotra credits five key strategies for his success, emphasizing treating internships like engineering labs, crafting a technically deep LaTeX résumé, timing applications for the August to November hiring window, rigorous interview prep, and a cold outreach strategy via LinkedIn and email that directly led to his Amazon offer.
The Internship Gambit
Here’s the thing Malhotra nailed that most people miss: he didn’t treat his internships like a summer camp. He treated them like an audition for the hardest job he could find. He actively sought out “real reliability or latency problems” that were affecting customers and owned them. That’s a world away from just completing assigned “intern tasks.” By building infrastructure and systems expertise early, he wasn’t just getting coffee or fixing minor bugs—he was creating a track record of solving production-level issues. That gave him instant credibility. Basically, he used the internship not as a line on his résumé, but as the foundational proof that he could already do the job. It’s a powerful mindset shift.
Résumé as a Weapon
His approach to the résumé is similarly tactical. Using LaTeX via Overleaf for a clean, parsable format is a pro move, but the real insight is in the content. Reverse-engineering job descriptions to pass ATS filters? Standard advice. But focusing every single bullet on quantifiable impact like “reduced data latency by 40%” is what separates a good résumé from one that gets you an interview at Microsoft. He avoided fluffy buzzwords and leaned hard into the language of scale and systems. It shows he understands that at these companies, engineering is about measurable outcomes, not effort. This is where having those deep internship experiences pays off—you can’t fake those numbers if you didn’t do the work.
The Cold Outreach Hack
Now, this is probably the most actionable tip for experienced folks. In a market saturated with online applications, Malhotra bypassed the black hole of the applicant tracking system entirely. He cold-emailed and LinkedIn-messaged recruiters with short, personalized pitches. And it worked. He says most of his serious interview loops, including the one for Amazon, started from that outreach. Think about that. He treated job hunting like a system design problem, mapping out targets and crafting specific value propositions. He even kept project repos and research papers handy to prove his value on the spot. This is a sales and marketing skill applied to a job search, and it clearly works. It takes more effort than just hitting “submit,” but the signal-to-noise ratio is infinitely better.
Timing and the Public Game
Malhotra’s point about timing is crucial, especially for new grads. The August to November window is when the bulk of hiring happens, and missing it means waiting for a smaller secondary window. But his final, added point for today’s market is the real kicker. He says he’d now put an even stronger emphasis on “building signal in public”—open-source contributions, writing, talks. This is about creating a body of work that exists outside your résumé, making you a known quantity. When the market tightens, as it has recently, that public track record and network of engineers and hiring managers make all your other strategies work harder. It’s about compounding your professional identity over time. So, is his advice a guaranteed formula? No. But it’s a remarkably coherent system from someone who has executed it multiple times at the highest level.
