Siddharth Kashiramka was six years into his post-master's career when he began considering his next move.
He worked as a product manager at Capital One and was previously a consultant at PwC. Some of his colleagues had gone to Amazon, but he didn't want to uproot his life from Virginia to Seattle. Then he was approached about an opportunity to work with artificial intelligence at Amazon — no move required.
To prepare for his interview, Kashiramka networked with contacts who'd made a similar transition, and he spent a month practicing for interviews, doing mock sessions on a career-service platform.
After several rounds of interviews, Kashiramka landed a product-management role at Amazon in 2022. The role came with about $300,000 in annual compensation, a mix of base salary and stock options.
As a hiring manager, Kashiramka says that while résumés are a small part of the overall hiring process, they can still be an important decision-making tool.
"I remember an instance where there were two equally good candidates for a position. Both of them cleared the final round of interviews, but the offer had to be given to only one," Kashiramka told Business Insider. "Ultimately, the decision hinged on the candidate with the most polished résumé."
Here's the résumé he used to apply to Amazon and other Big Tech companies. It wasn't perfect — he said he'd change three major components.
Looking back on the résumé, Kashiramka said three things worked well:
1. Talk about impact: He gave a high-level description of past roles, followed by his work and its impact.
2. Summarize: "The summary is very unique to me," he said. "You can't copy-paste it to someone else." He added that in the future, he'd also add a short section talking about his external mentorship efforts and academic journal contributions, which he has been doing more actively since 2022.
3. Show variety: Throughout the résumé, Kashiramka used a range of keywords, including "leveraged," "delivered," "established," and "collaborated." He said that "unintentionally, this also optimizes for the ATS systems as well," referring to the application tracking systems that digitally parse résumés for keywords.
What he would change
While the résumé got Kashiramka interviews at Meta, Amazon, and Google, there are still a few things he'd change moving forward:
1. One-page résumé: "I think the résumé should be one page," he said. "That was a big red flag for me here in this résumé." Kashiramka added that his résumés for PwC and Capital One, where he worked before Amazon, were both one page and that he'd return to that length in the future.
2. Use first-person voice: Kashiramka said another mistake was writing about himself in the third person because it sounds less personal. "It seems very pompous, to be honest," he said. "I'm like: 'Who am I talking about here?'"
3. Attention to detail: "I have made a few grammatical mistakes in this," he said. He recommended using a proofreading tool and getting another set of human eyes on the document.
Kashiramka said that while there were grammatical errors, he was careful to be consistent with the formatting, such as not using periods anywhere.
Kashiramka is a senior product manager at Amazon's office in Crystal City, Virginia. Business Insider has verified his employment history and compensation.
