This is an as-told-to essay based on a conversation with Ritvika Nagula, a senior software engineer at Microsoft Azure. She’s worked at the company since 2019. Her employment and job offers were confirmed by Business Insider. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I graduated around December 2018 and shortly after landed four job offers, including from Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, and a startup. I chose Microsoft and joined in April 2019.
I was not just cold-applying, I was applying everywhere: on LinkedIn, on Indeed, I was going to direct company portals to apply from there. I was reaching out to people on LinkedIn who were at those companies, or if I was able to find out who the hiring manager for a particular role was.
I tried to use all my networking skills to at least make sure that my résumé got through from the initial phase, when it’s just recruiters or just some hiring manager going through papers without actually knowing you. While cold-applying isn’t the most effective, if you have a strong résumé, it can eventually work out for you.
For software engineers, at least from what I’ve seen throughout my career, the résumé is definitely the most important thing. The cover letter is almost always optional. So I took extra care to make my résumé stand out.
Highlight your individual projects, including ones you did on the side
If you have any internship experiences or previous work experience, that should be something that you highlight at the top of your résumé because that immediately makes it stand out, even if it was just three or four months. Some companies also take co-ops, and I was a co-op intern at a startup for seven months. That was at the top of my résumé.
You also should list individual projects you have worked on. For every project that I had listed on my résumé, I made sure to highlight the programming languages and tools and how I used them. This helps in two ways. It helps somebody reading your résumé understand that you have this breadth of tools and languages that you have used, and then, within the project description, you go into two to three lines of detail to explain how you used those particular tools.
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You should have three kinds of projects: One would be a project you worked on in your internship. Another is going to be the projects that you did as part of your coursework, in grad school or undergrad. And then the third should be all the extra projects that you did on the side, which show that you’re really passionate about becoming a software engineer.
This would be something you did on your own time. Nobody gave you grades, and you didn’t have to submit this at a particular time. No deadlines, no assessment. Just something that you did for yourself. One of these I included was a Facebook chatbot I made, which you could use to get information about books. So you would essentially be talking to a chatbot and asking, “What about this book?” And it would give you a quick summary. I built it using publicly available APIs from GoodReads.
Show your work with GitHub
For software engineers, GitHub is like a substitute for a cover letter. It’s something that everybody uses to maintain their code in, and you can have a private repository, or you can have a public repository. I leveraged it by keeping all the projects that I did as part of my coursework updated in my GitHub profile. I also made sure that I updated the code for all these tiny extracurricular projects that I had.
Then I put my GitHub username on the résumé itself and hyperlinked to my actual GitHub portfolio page.
That way, if a prospective hiring manager is going through your résumé, and let’s say one of your projects catches their eye — if they want to go look at it, you are giving free and easy access to them right there. That automatically gives you an edge over somebody else who’s just written, “worked on this chatbot for X and Y.” Having the code out there in GitHub shows this website was actually coded by you, and you didn’t use a website builder tool.
This allows your work to speak for itself. It’s not like you’ve just written down something on a résumé. When you put it out there on GitHub, it proves that you’ve actually done something about it.
There are all these AI tools and AI agents now that can make your life a little easier, and vibe coding is definitely a phenomenon. But before you jump into that, it’s always better to have a deeper understanding of the code that you’re working with because there is only so much the AI agent is going to understand.
See her résumé in full below:
Ritvika Nagula
Do you have a story to share about getting hired? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@businessinsider.com.
