Status: Junior computer science student at a Canadian university. No prior internship experience
Position: Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon
Location: Vancouver, Canada
Date: Jan 15, 2021

Timeline

• Nov 4: application via employee referral
• Nov 24: online assessment 1
• Nov 28: online assessment 2
• Dec 1: online assessment 3
• Dec 10: confirmation for final interview
• Jan 8: video interview
• Jan 15: offer

Online Assessments

• OA1 (20 minutes): Code Debugging
  Fix the bug in 7 short algorithm questions. You only need to change one line to arrive at the correct solution, so don’t overthink it. To save time, don’t read the full problem description because the function name is enough to figure out what the question wants. Note that you can only choose C++, C or Java for this round. I got 6/7 and received OA2 on the same day.

• OA2 (70 minutes): Coding and Workstyles Assessments
  Two questions from this list (not all links are valid but try to solve all the ones you can find). I was lucky enough to get 1 Easy + 1 Medium question and passed all testcases. I highly recommend setting up a local code editor and file beforehand because the online editor they provide leaves a lot to be desired. Reminder: unlike LeetCode, you must manually import all libraries / headers.
  The coding portion was followed by a short work style assessment asking you to pick the statement that most accurately describes you. I received OA3 on the same day.

• OA3 (120 minutes): Work Simulation
  This was by far the most intimidating round because there’s not much you can do to prepare for it. Familiarize yourself with the 14 Leadership Principles (LPs) and some basic OOP concepts. The most critical LPs for this round seem to be Customer Obsession, Ownership and (leaders) Are Right, A Lot. More importantly, keep a steady pace and read the text thoroughly. It may seem a bit overwhelming at first because there are so many questions, but 2 hours is actually more than enough time. I have no clue how I performed in this round but it was enough to receive a final interview.

Phone Interview (45 minutes)
One 45 minute video interview consisting of coding and behavioral questions. I have seen interns get asked questions as difficult as Word Ladder or Word Break II and as simple as Remove Vowels from a String. It’s truly all about luck. I fell somewhere in the middle and got asked a Medium backtracking question. The shared online editor we used (different from the one from OA2) had no run code functionality so I started manually typing out the call stack to test my recursive function with a sample input. The interviewer stopped me halfway and said she’s convinced the code works.

The coding question was followed by a some behavioral questions (tell me about a time where you had to make a quick decision + a time when you went above and beyond with a task). We finished in less than 40 minutes and I used the remaining time to ask some of my own questions.

4 business days later, my amazonuniversity.jobs portal changed from Under Review to Moved to Another Job, which is normally an indication that you got the job. However, my amazon.jobs page shows No Longer Under Consideration for my original application. I had no idea what this meant and had to wait until the next day for an official confirmation (bruh). I received the offer the next day.

Preparation

• Solved around 650 questions plus a few mock interviews on LeetCode and another website. I strongly suggest solving all Easy/Medium Top Amazon Questions and doing a few Hard ones if time permits (they are definitely hard). If you are new to interviewing, make sure to practice at least one mock video interview with a real human being because coding in front of another person is a totally different ballgame. I never had a coding interview before and learned this the hard way. For LeetCode mock interviews, be warned that their marking scheme is extremely harsh so don’t be discouraged. You basically need to be a competitive programmer to score above 8/10, and anything above 5/10 is a pretty good score.
• For the behavioral portion, check out Dan Croitor and especially this video. They do not expect Stephen King level storytelling from interns, so don’t stress out. Most people recommend preparing two stories for each of the 14 Leadership Principles, but that’s both unnecessary and impossible for most interns. I only prepared around 6 stories in total but each of them strongly reflected multiple LPs.