Roadmap to Your Resume
A resume guide for students and new grads by AWS University Recruiters Rumjhum Hemnani and Claire Gao
AWS University Recruiter
Recruiting season can feel like a lot: specific lingo, a hundred tabs of conflicting advice, scrolling LinkedIn endlessly, and the feeling that everyone else has it figured out. If staring at your resume makes your stomach drop a little, you're in good company. We're Amazon University Talent Acquisition recruiters who hire both intern and full-time technical roles under AWS, and we want to help students like you feel less stuck.
While there’s no single “right” way to build a resume, this guide walks through what recruiters are looking for. For anyone going after a 2027 internship or a full-time new grad role, take what's useful, and make it your own!
1. Make your education/graduation timeline obvious
Education is the first criteria we check for, and we appreciate when we see it as the topmost section. Include your graduation date, university, degree and major, those dates, and (if applicable) a handful of courses that connect to the job you're targeting under "Relevant Coursework".
The graduation date is paramount: when you finish school decides which openings we can consider you for.
- Internships generally expect you to return to school for at least one more academic term once the internship wraps up.
- New grad full-time roles are built for people completing their degree before their start date.
If you are starting another program after your upcoming graduation (for example, you know you will be pursuing a graduate degree after your undergraduate graduation), you unfortunately cannot be considered for these full-time roles. If you know which graduate degree program you will enter, feel free to add those details in the education section with an updated grad date. That way, you can still be considered for internships!
Spell out the month and year you started and expect to finish (for example, Aug 2023 – Dec 2027). If that changes because of a co-op, an extra term, or a master's program, update it right away. Writing "– present", "current", or just the year ("2026") can leave recruiters guessing which roles you're eligible for.
On GPA: Adding your GPA is up to you. A 3.0 or higher can help strengthen your case and is generally worth listing, written as "3.4/4.0." If your GPA is under 3.0, consider leaving it off and letting your projects and experience carry the page. GPA is only one data point, not the end-all deciding factor.
On coursework: A relevant courses section can be an indicator of where your interests lie, but it’s also not meant to be your transcript. 6 to 8 courses is plenty. Lead with the ones closest to the role, such as data structures, systems, databases, or machine learning for an ML-focused job. Upper-division or graduate classes are worth including, and once you're a junior or senior, intro classes can go.
On timing: Amazon often starts hiring for the next summer's internships and new grad classes in early fall. Have your resume ready before then so you can jump on those applications when they open and be ready to engage with recruiters during career fairs!
2. Write an Experience section that shows your impact
The goal for every line under your experiences is to show what you did and your impact.
Set up each entry so it's easy to scan. List the organization, your title, the location, and your start and end dates (month and year). Under each role, aim for 2–5 bullets, with your most impressive ones first. Your most recent or most relevant roles can have more bullets, and older ones can have fewer.
Backing it up with numbers and data
At Amazon, we make decisions backed by data, and your resume gets read the same way.
Build each bullet from three parts: an action, the tech or method behind it, and a measurable outcome. Numbers can come from many places: users reached, time saved, latency cut, accuracy gained, defects caught, or team size.
Give your numbers context. "Cut costs by 20%" means something different for a class project than for a service with thousands of users. Mentioning the scale helps the reader understand the size of your impact. Keep every number honest, though -- if it's on the page, you may be asked how you measured it.
Writing clear and concise bullets
Focus on your accomplishments, not the job duties. "Worked on the backend API" tells me what you were assigned, but "redesigned the REST API to batch database queries, cutting average response time by 40%" is able to contextualize your role and its subsequent impact. While not every single bullet needs a number, quantifying your impact where applicable helps paint us a picture of what you’re capable of.
Lead with strong action verbs. Instead of vague openers like helped with, worked on, or responsible for, pick a verb that proudly showcases exactly what you did.
- Building: built, developed, designed, implemented, engineered, deployed, launched
- Improving: optimized, automated, streamlined, refactored, reduced, scaled, migrated
- Leading: led, mentored, organized, coordinated, founded, trained
- Analyzing: analyzed, investigated, evaluated, measured, researched, debugged
Be clear about your part in team work. If you worked on a team/group project, call out what you personally owned (for example, "designed the database schema for a 4-person capstone team").
Keep your tenses and voice consistent. Use past tense for finished roles and present tense for current ones, and skip "I" and "my." Use active voice, not passive.
3. Group your skills
For technical roles, the skills list is a gateway to help us understand whether you match specific teams or specializations within the role, especially for technical spaces with great breadth such as software engineering. If you have niche skills, ensure you're letting those skills appear on your resume -- you never know when a highly Specialized recruiter may be looking at your resume.
Break up your skills section into labeled groups based on the kind of work you do, and be sure to list tools you'd be comfortable discussing in depth. Even if repetitive to your Projects or Experience section, ensure technical skills listed there are simultaneously listed under the Skills section. Here's an example of how it could look:
Languages: Java, Python, C++, Go, JavaScript/TypeScript
Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS, CloudFormation), Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform
Backend & Systems: REST APIs, gRPC, microservices architecture, distributed systems, multithreading
Data & Storage: PostgreSQL, Redis, Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch
Developer Tools: Git, CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins), Linux/Unix, IntelliJ, VS Code
A few more pointers:
- Reorder or trim the list for each application so the most relevant skills come first.
- We tend to stay away from including soft skills like "teamwork" or "communication" or generally vague descriptions of technical skills (e.g., "data analysis" or "programming") in this section. Show those through your experience bullets instead.
- If you’d like to include certifications, consider adding those under a separate bullet or section. (Shameless plug -
-explore AWS certifications here , if you haven’t already!)
The Skills section can come right below the Education section or at the bottom of the page.
4. Give us somewhere to click!
A resume is just one part of your story. Links allow recruiters and hiring managers see your work for themselves, and truly, many of us do click! Add your GitHub, LinkedIn, and/or personal site to the header, next to your name and email. For each project you list, embed a link so the reader can jump straight to the code or a demo. Hiring Managers frequently glance through projects and work experience to get a sense of your technical work.
Before you send it off:
- Test every link from the exported PDF, not just your editing copy.
- Keep link text short and clean, like "github.com/yourname."
- Pin your strongest repos and give each one a brief README covering what it does and how to run it.
- Add dates to projects so readers can see when you built them and how long you worked on them.
On choosing which projects to feature: Projects can show what you do when nobody hands you a spec, and that kind of ownership is highly valued at Amazon. Favor projects that:
- Solve a real problem or use real data
- Go end to end, from design to something people can use
- Show off system design, ML, or open-source work
- Won or placed at a hackathon, or grew out of research
Consider skipping projects you copied from a tutorial without changing much, unfinished work, or routine homework.
5. Short on job experience? Show your work another way!
Contrary to popular belief, you don't require previous internship experience in order to qualify or interview for a role at Amazon -- never discount yourself! Whether it's your first internship search or your new grad search, a blank Experience section is more common than you think in the university hiring space, and you have more “experiences” to show than you might realize, such as:
- Side projects, class projects, or hackathon builds
- Time as a teaching assistant, tutor, or research lab member
- Industry certifications you've earned
- Clubs, organizations, or events where you held a leadership role
Write these up with the same care as you would for a job or internship, using the same bullet tips from Section 2: strong action verb, what you built or did, and the results.
6. Let your resume reflect Amazon's Leadership Principles
Amazon has 16 Leadership Principles (LPs) that shape how we hire, and they come up throughout the interview process. You don't need to name them on your resume or paste them in as buzzwords. Rather, choose experiences that subtly highlight them in action.
Here's how a few LPs might show up in student resumes:
Leadership Principle | Example Bullet Showing the LP |
|---|---|
Customer Obsession | Analyzed support tickets to find the top 3 student complaints about the course registration tool; built a waitlist notification feature that cut duplicate enrollment attempts by 60% |
Invent and Simplify | Consolidated three separate Slack bots into a single lightweight Discord bot using Node.js, reducing the club's hosting costs from $45/month to $0 |
Deep Dive | Analyzed 10K+ rows of user clickstream data to identify a drop-off in the checkout flow; pinpointed a broken redirect on mobile, increasing conversion by 15% |
Deliver Results | Built and deployed a real-time dashboard aggregating 500K+ daily sensor readings using Kafka and PostgreSQL, delivered on schedule for the lab's grant review |
Your Leadership & Involvement section can often demonstrate many of these: club leadership, organizing events, mentoring, running an open-source project, or giving a talk all count. However, remember that a title alone won't carry much weight; what you drove, and its results are what matters.
7. Cleaning up formatting details
Strong content can get lost in a messy layout. Take a look at this resume template/guide built by Maggie Blanchard, one of our fabulous fellow university recruiters.
Some quick rules of thumb:
- Keep it to one page. For most students and new grads, one page almost always has room for everything that matters.
- Pick a simple, single-column layout. Clean, simple, black-and-white formatting is easier to skim. Text boxes, graphics, icons, and multiple columns can make a page feel cluttered.
- Give the file a clear name like FirstName-LastName-Resume.pdf.
- Order things by most current within each section.
- Stay consistent. Use one date format, past tense for finished work, present tense for current roles, and matching fonts and spacing.
- Stay updated! Life moves fast as a student, whether you finished a new project or landed a new leadership role in a campus org. Make sure your resume is up to date with all that you’ve been working on!
- Leave off what is not necessary, like a photo, your age, or an objective/summary statement.
Draft, proofread, revise, repeat! It may take you several drafts of your resume before you land on the version that feels right for you and what you're applying for. Get an extra set of eyes on it as well, like a friend or a contact at your university’s Career Center.
8. You made your resume! Next up: networking and leveraging LinkedIn
Now that you have your lovely resume in hand... what else do you do other than attaching it to your application?
Keep LinkedIn in your rotation! While you certainly don’t need to be actively posting on LinkedIn all the time, it is a very helpful resource to be aware of when new roles drop through LinkedIn job alerts. Recruiters are often looking on LinkedIn to find new talent, so keeping your education, experiences, and skills updated can help ensure you're on their radar when they search.
Leverage your school and alumni network! Whether it’s directly through your university’s Career Center or alumni associations and network, you more than likely will be able to find someone connected to your dream company or in your dream role. Don’t be afraid to reach out to someone -- they may be more than willing to give you a 15 minute virtual coffee chat.
Come talk to us! Whether you're at a career fair or an info session, don't be afraid to chat with us, ask questions, and be personable. Ask thoughtful questions about the teams, the work, or the interview process -- we love meeting students excited about what Amazon is building.
Side note on LinkedIn: We truly appreciate every message we receive, and we can see the effort you put into reaching out! However, our inboxes get pretty full, and we often can’t get to every one of them. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t hear back there -- we are always excited to engage at events and see your application come through.
As university recruiters, we're all rooting for you, and we want to see you succeed! We're looking forward to seeing what you've been working on and applying to our 2027 technical roles. Best of luck!
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