The Off-Campus Placement Nobody Talks About — How I Got Into Amazon Without a Dream Company Visit

NIT Surathkal is a good college with a decent placement record. Amazon did not visit our campus in my batch's placement season. This fact, which I discovered in October of my final year, initially felt like an information I was not allowed to have. Then it felt like a problem. Then it felt like a project.

I want to describe the off-campus process in detail because every piece of advice I found online was either vague ('network, network, network') or dated (referring to processes that had changed). Here is exactly what I did, what worked, and what I spent three months getting wrong before I got it right.

Step 1: Finding the Application Channel

Amazon hires extensively off-campus through their university hiring portal, which is separate from the standard jobs page. You need to specifically search for 'Amazon university hiring' and apply through the portal rather than through LinkedIn or the main site. This seems obvious in retrospect and took me three weeks to figure out because I was applying to the wrong place.

Step 2: The Resume Problem

I sent 40 applications in October and heard back from zero. In November I had someone who had gotten an Amazon offer from off-campus review my resume. She told me two things: my projects did not include impact metrics (users, load, performance numbers), and my summary statement was generic in a way that filtered me out of keyword-based screening. I rewrote the resume over a weekend, added numbers to every project bullet point, and had a summary that specifically called out systems engineering and distributed computing experience.

I sent applications in November with the new resume. I heard back from Amazon in the first week of December.

The Interview Process

Two online assessments, three technical interviews, one bar-raiser interview. The online assessments were standard DSA, mediums-hard, nothing unusual if you had been preparing. The technical interviews were heavy on system design and on questions about past experience — specifically, how I had handled scale and failure in the projects on my resume.

The bar-raiser interview is the one that almost got me. It is conducted by someone from a different team who has veto power over offers. The questions are behavioural and they probe leadership principles. I had not prepared specifically for Amazon LP questions, which was an oversight. I knew about the principles but had not structured STAR stories around each of them. I survived the bar-raiser by talking honestly about the fest website incident, the failure and the post-mortem, in a way that apparently resonated. The offer came in January.

If your college does not have your target company on campus: the off-campus path is harder but not closed. The resume matters more. The application channel matters more. The specific preparation for that company's interview culture matters more. None of this is impossible. It just requires doing work that on-campus candidates do not have to do, which means starting earlier.