From Degree to Day Job

How did I end up with my Job at Amazon and what does it take to get in the door.

This talk covers both my journey to Amazon, as well as goes over one of my favorite interview questions to ask during interviews. Not only do we discuss and solve the problem, we take it one step further and deploy the code to AWS to make a working solution.

Code: https://github.com/tpaulus/python-urlshortener-cdk

Transcript

1. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Tom Paulus, Software Development Engineer
   EC2 Commercial Software Services
   December 2, 2021
   From Degree to Day Job
   How to get your foot in the door and where it can take you.
   

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2. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Summary
   • Background: Who am I and what do I do?
   • How did I get to where I am today?
   • Interviews at Amazon: Tips from the other side of the table
   • Solving an Amazon Interview Coding Question (and taking it a step further)
   • Q & A
   

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3. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   A little bit about myself
   

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4. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Who am I & what do I do?
   • Software Development Engineer II (SDE II)
   at Amazon Web Services working on EC2
   Image Builder. Mainly focus on the service
   Control Plane (APIs) and the Service
   Operations (Integration Tests, Canary
   Tests, Monitoring, Alarming, etc.)
   • I’ve been at Amazon for almost 4 years
   working on the same team, although what
   we work on has changed significantly
   from when I started.
   • I wear A LOT of hats, one of them being
   supporting my organization with AWS’s
   C2S Contract.
   C2S is the government program and contract vehicle that brings AWS “over the fence” and into the Intelligence Community (IC). This air-gapped AWS
   Region on the Top Secret fabric has been operating since 2014 and is exclusively available to the U.S. IC.
   

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5. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   How did I end up at Amazon
   • Attended San Diego State University from
   2015-2018, majoring in Computer Science
   (B.S.).
   • Applied to Intern at 13 different
   companies in the Fall of 2017 including
   Apple, Google, Amazon, ServiceNow,
   Facebook, Netflix, Intuit.
   • Summer Internship with Amazon Web
   Services in the Summer of 2018.
   • Returned to AWS as a Full Time Software
   Development Engineer (SDE I) in the
   Summer of 2018, moving to Seattle along
   the way.
   

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6. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Interviewing at
   Amazon
   Tips from the other side of the table
   

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7. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   What will be asked of you?
   • Online Assessment
   • Interns: 1 Interview
   • Full Time: 3 Interviews
   • Each interviewer will typically ask
   you two behavioral and one
   functional (coding) question.
   • Each behavioral question will
   focus on one of Amazon’s
   Leadership Principals
   Interviewers are looking for you to
   respond using the STAR method.
   Situation/Task
   Action
   Result
   Answering using the STAR Method
   will give your interviewer what they
   need to support hiring you!
   

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8. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Amazon’s Leadership Principals (LPs)
   • Customer Obsession
   • Ownership
   • Invent and Simplify
   • Are Right, A Lot
   • Learn and Be Curious
   • Hire and Develop the Best
   • Insist on the Highest Standards
   • Think Big
   • Bias for Action
   • Frugality
   • Earn Trust
   • Dive Deep
   • Have Backbone; Disagree and
   Commit
   • Deliver Results
   • Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
   • Success and Scale Bring Broad
   Responsibility
   

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9. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
   Solving an Amazon
   Coding Problem
   And then deploying it to AWS via CDK
   

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10. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    How to create a TinyURL system?
    TinyURL is a URL shortening service, a web service that provides short aliases for
    redirection of long URLs. So if you would design and implement a system, in the
    language of your choice, that allows people input URLs with short alias URLs
    generated, how would you do it?
    

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11. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Let’s Write Some Code
    

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12. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    

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13. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    AWS Cloud Development Kit
    CDK is an open-source software development framework to define
    cloud infrastructure in code and provision it through AWS
    CloudFormation.
    It offers a high-level object-oriented abstraction to define AWS
    resources imperatively using the power of modern programming
    languages. Using the CDK’s library of infrastructure constructs, you can
    easily encapsulate AWS best practices in your infrastructure definition
    and share it without worrying about boilerplate logic.
    

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14. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    CDK Output → CloudFormation
    

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15. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Try it out!
    Use CURL or your browser to make new short URLs:
    curl ‘https://go.paulusto.people.aws.dev/?targetUrl=example.com’
    Then try visiting the returned
    short-url in a browser!
    

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16. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Q&A
    Tom Paulus
    

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17. © 2021, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates.
    Thank You!
    Code: https://github.com/tpaulus/python-
    urlshortener-cdk
    Slides: https://tompaulus.com/#talks
    

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