An Indian software engineer described how he secured a role at Amazon in July 2025 after significantly revising a job-hunt approach that began months earlier in the United States. He shared the experience during an interview in Phoenix, where he now works. According to him, the shift mattered because his initial applications brought almost no results. What started as a conventional job search eventually became a structured, targeted strategy that changed his trajectory.
Amazon job search: What changed
The engineer, Jugal Bhatt, moved to the US in 2024 for a computer science master’s program at the University of Illinois. He began applying for jobs eight months before his May 2025 graduation, expecting early outreach to give him an advantage. Instead, his progress stalled. He relied on a single resume, applied broadly without customisation and avoided direct outreach to recruiters. Consequently, he received very few interview calls despite applying to dozens of companies.
By late 2024, he recognised the need for a more deliberate method. Bhatt started identifying recruiters, hiring managers and employees at his target companies, including Amazon, using Boolean searches on LinkedIn. This helped him compile a list of 100 to 150 firms. He set a daily goal of contacting professionals from these companies, gradually expanding his network and increasing his visibility in the hiring ecosystem.
Impact on his prospects
The shift paid off. As Bhatt’s LinkedIn activity increased, so did recruiter engagement. Interview requests began arriving from multiple organisations. One of the early outcomes was an offer from LiteLLM, where he accepted a founding software engineer role after graduating. Throughout this period, he stayed in touch with an Amazon recruiter who had reached out earlier. When new openings aligned with his skill set, he completed the online assessment and progressed through several interview rounds.
How the offer arrived
Bhatt received the Amazon offer in July 2025 and resigned from LiteLLM soon afterward. He credits tailored resumes, purposeful networking and a robust set of visible projects for helping him stand out. In his view, interviews demanded far more preparation than the job itself. His advice to applicants is straightforward: identify the right recruiters, build genuine connections and understand how hiring teams surface strong resumes within internal systems.
