Hey folks, I'm excited to share that I'll be joining Amazon Web Services as a Software Development Engineer I in about 90 days! I'm currently wrapping up my Computer Science degree, and I want to maximize this time to prepare myself so that I can hit the ground running once I start. For those of you who have experience working at AWS or in other large-scale engineering environments, what are the key technical skills or concepts I should focus on before my first day? Any advice or resources that helped you in your early days would be super helpful. Thanks in advance!
4 Answers
Yes! I’ll be part of the Serverless team.
Are you going in as an intern or full-time?
Do you already know what team you'll be joining?
Congrats on joining AWS! Here’s my advice: make sure to get a solid grasp on the fundamentals of AWS. Dive into some practical hands-on labs, and then familiarize yourself with CloudFormation and the Cloud Development Kit (CDK).
I’d also recommend reaching out to your hiring manager to ask for insights about which internal services they rely on most, as this might help you focus your learning.
Don't forget to check out AWS blogs that discuss how they build their internal services. Some older blogs that cover distributed systems principles are particularly valuable, especially if you end up working on foundational services like DynamoDB, EC2, or S3. One interesting read I came across was about jitter and exponential backoff—definitely a useful concept to understand. Good luck!
I'll be starting full time!