Indian-American techie, 23, quit Amazon for ₹3.6 crore Meta offer: Here’s how he got the job

Manoj Tumu, who now works at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for an eye-popping salary of $400,000 or ₹3.36 crore left Amazon to join the social media giant at its advertising research team, he said in an article for Business Insider.

“In June, I left Amazon to join Meta as a machine learning software engineer for a total compensation of over $400,000. I was really excited about it and knew I wanted to take the job as soon as I got the offer,” he said in the article.

Explaining his reason to leave his job at Amazon, the GenZ techie said, “Though I had learned a lot at Amazon, I just thought there was more interesting work going on at Meta.”

Manoj Tumu reveals how he got $400,000 Meta offer

In his article, Manoj Tumu said that the AI and Machine Learning fields have undergone a drastic change over the past few years.

“It used to be a lot more acceptable to just use classical techniques, which rely on humans to make decisions about data representations. Now the focus is on deep learning, which taps into artificial neural networks to automatically learn features from raw data,” he wrote.

Giving advice to AI job seekers, he said there are multiple variations in the title of the job — it could be research scientist, applied scientist, software engineer, or machine learning engineer, depending on the company.

The other crucial advice Manoj Tumu gave to people trying to break into the AI and Machine Learning field is to try to get a tech internship during college.

He advised that even low-paying internships can be beneficial for a machine learning career, and to not worry about the pay.

Manoj Tumu, who started his masters degree career in 2022, advised that experience is the biggest factor in landing roles at big tech companies, adding that he left cold emails. He said that his decent resume helped him secure his jobs at Meta and Amazon, as he did not have a reference for either of the companies.

“When I see the résumés that people post online, asking for advice, I see projects or programming languages taking up space,” he wrote.

Rather than highlighting projects on resume, Tumu advised to add experience.

“My general advice would be that once you have two or three years of experience, it’s OK to remove the projects and focus more on highlighting your experience.”

The common mistake

One common mistake that job seekers make during interviews is during the behavioural round.

He noted that he went through six rounds of interviews at Amazon “where they asked coding, machine learning, and behavioral questions.”

He said that he studied the company’s values to prepare for the behavioural interview and had a “huge document” where he would write down stories to answer possible questions along with follow-ups.

Manoj Tumu suggested job seekers to do the same — read up the company’s values and leadership principles and prepare tailored answers depending on each scenario.