Internship Experience - Amazon (Summer of 2019)
Written by Aakash Kumar, batch of 2020, as part of the InPlace series by Cepstrum, IIT Guwahati.
Hello, readers! I am Aakash Kumar, a final year undergrad student at IIT Guwahati. I am pursuing a major in Electronics and Electrical Engineering (EEE).
In this article, I am going to describe my 2 month-long internship at Amazon Bangalore office.
Arriving in Bangalore for the first time ever:
I reached Bangalore on the 19th of May. As soon as my flight landed at Bangalore airport, I got a cab service arranged by Amazon, which drove me straight to the Hotel Fairfield by Marriott Bengaluru Whitefield, a 3-star hotel based in Mahadevpura, near my office location.
For interns, accommodation for the first 15 days and transport to and from the office was taken care of by Amazon.
After 15 days, we checked out from the hotel and relocated to a PG (back to reality!), but the initial arrangements made by Amazon eased the process of moving to a new city for us.
Day One at Amazon:
On our first day at Amazon office, a couple of introductory sessions were organized by HRs to give us an insight into what Amazon is as a company and what is expected from interns.
The orientations also introduced to us the core leadership principles that Amazon follows.
After the orientation sessions, we were given a backpack containing some goodies and some necessary tech equipment that we would use during the internship. The backpack also contained (most importantly!) a MacBook Pro and its accessories for us to work with throughout the internship.
Work at Amazon:
The team I worked with was called Retail Business Services Tech (RBS Tech). RBS Tech itself was divided into further sub-teams depending on the problem each sub-team works on.
To be specific, I was working with the Automated Correction and Enrichment(ACE) team - a child node of parent team RBS Tech.
Our team was working on a really challenging task which heavily involved Machine Learning and Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources.
While working on the above feature, I got to implement various AWS resources like DynamoDB, Kinesis Firehose, S3, CloudFormation, AWS Lambda, etc.
After completing this, I also got a chance to work on the backend of a progress portal that our team was building from scratch.
I was lucky to be able to work on different projects and learn different aspects of working on a real-life problem. I got the opportunity to learn and understand the industry standard of the coding and problem-solving paradigm.
AWS is being widely used all over the tech community and is a very in-demand technology skill at present. It helps if you have prior experience of working with AWS.
All Work and no Play…
Amazon is not just about work. We had a small cricket pitch, pool tables, foosball, carrom boards, table tennis, and my favorite X-Box within our building only. Just after our daily stand-up, our team used to have lunch together and play games together.
I personally liked to play Rocket League, Tekken, Forza Horizon and Need For Speed on X-Box.
Perks!
In my opinion, the greatest perk of working at Amazon is that you get to interact and work with very intelligent and talented people. This helps you widen the scope of your connections in the community and most importantly learn from them.
Now coming to the materialistic perks:
1) You get a decent stipend with which you can pay off all your bills and expenditure while staying in Bangalore and still save for future needs.
2) You get a MacBook Pro and all its accessories from the office only. You can also take it home with you after office hours.
3) You can opt to Work From Home (WFH) in case you can not attend the office due to any circumstances.
4) Working hours are flexible.
5) At the beginning of every month, Rs 1100/- are credited to your zeta account, which you can use to pay for whatever you eat in the office cafeteria.
At last, I would like to say that Amazon is a great place to work.
Amazon’s dynamic work culture, young and talented colleagues, opportunities to solve real-life problems and see their impact on a global scale, really makes it one of the best choices to start your corporate life with.
It’s still Day 1 @ Amazon! :)
