This summer, Princeton sophomore Kyaw Naing returned to his hometown of New York City for a 12-week internship with Amazon’s Grocery Subscription team, an opportunity made possible through the Amazon Future Engineer (AFE) program. AFE is a highly competitive national initiative that aims to support students from underrepresented and underserved communities in STEM, offering college scholarships, mentorship, and paid internships at Amazon. Kyaw was one of only 400 students selected for the program. As an Electrical and Computer Engineering student from Queens, Kyaw saw the internship as a chance to push himself beyond the classroom. During his time with the Grocery Subscription team, he tackled real-world technical challenges at massive scales while working on services that millions of customers rely on every day.
The team owns the whole lifecycle of Grocery Subscription and focuses on building the Amazon Grocery Subscription, enabling customers to subscribe and order groceries. Work on the team involves significant research into sophisticated cloud infrastructure and pipelines and for Kyaw, this was the perfect environment to connect what he learned in his COS classes with real-world practice and research.
First Impressions
Landing back in New York for the summer, Kyaw was struck by how different life as an Amazon intern felt compared to his classes at Princeton. From day one, he was immersed in team meetings, code reviews, and hands-on work with AWS services. The learning curve was steep, but also exciting.
“The scale of the problems here was unlike anything I’d seen before,” Kyaw said. “Even small bugs or inefficiencies could impact thousands of customers. I had to think beyond just getting code to work. I had to make it reliable, scalable, and maintainable so people can contribute to what I work on after I leave.”
The Amazon Future Engineer program helped Kyaw navigate this environment. Through AFE, Kyaw received guidance from his mentor and teammates, attended workshops that connected him with engineers across the company, and learned how to approach complex systems thoughtfully.
Diving Into the Work
Kyaw’s primary responsibility on the Grocery Subscription team involved building a Grocery Subscription Retention system that saved Amazon hundreds of thousands of dollars. Due to an NDA, he cannot share many details. However, this experience provided him with hands-on exposure to AWS services. Beyond coding, Kyaw learned the full software development cycle, which includes participating in sprint planning sessions, conducting code reviews with other software engineers, and collaborating with team members across different time zones.
Balancing Work and the City
Outside of work, Kyaw reconnected with his hometown through fresh eyes. After spending his first year at Princeton away from home, the summer gave him the chance to spend quality time with his family again. He wandered through neighborhoods on his bike, revisited corners of Queens, and explored the city’s endless food scene in Jackson Heights—the heart of Queens known for its incredible diversity and authentic international cuisine. He also pursued his photography, capturing the city’s energy and everyday moments wherever he went. For him, the summer was as much about rediscovering New York through his lens as it was about his work at Amazon.
Looking Forward
As Kyaw returns to Princeton for his sophomore year, he brings with him more than just technical growth. He now approaches engineering problems with a focus on scalability, efficiency, and collaboration—skills that extend beyond the classroom.
“This experience showed me how to design systems that can scale and adapt,” Kyaw reflected. “It also taught me that communication and collaboration are just as important as technical knowledge.”
For Kyaw, the summer was more than an internship. It was a firsthand look at how large-scale engineering powers everyday life, a chance to practice leadership and teamwork in a high-impact setting, and a turning point in how he approaches both technology and learning.
— Aishah Shahid, Engineering Correspondent
