Over summer 2023, I was a Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon Web Services (AWS) working from the headquarters in Seattle, WA, USA. Right off the bat, I would like to say that it was no less than a transformative experience. The amount of visibility that I have gained into the organization, support that I have received from my mentors, and the responsibility that I had made it a great working and experiential learning experience at the same time. I had opportunities to learn and work with the state-of-the-art tools used in the Big Tech industry, while developing my personal skills through training curriculum, lectures and presentations. Most importantly it made me realize different challenges and responsibilities that the engineering teams at Amazon face on a daily basis, when making changes to a production level codebase. Personally, getting the experience of being able to produce novel work, rigorously testing it at multiple stages, and then pushing it into production through CI/CD pipelines just after my sophomore year was the biggest highlight. Finally, I am pleased to say that I had the opportunity to be able to work with teams located internationally. This definitely came with challenges of scheduling and communication, but on the brighter side, I think this experience increased my confidence in communicating across different non-colocated teams, which is generally only possible at companies with the scale comparable to that of Amazon.
