Status: 3 YOE, CS from Tier 1 College
Position: SDE1 at FAANGM
Location: India
Date: Jan 2021
Interview Process
Phone Interview
- given a string s containing '(' and ')' find if it's balanced.
- Given a 2d matrix of 1 and 0, find the number of connected components
- What is hashing? hash map? Collision ?, properties of a good hash function
Few LP questions like "Name one situation when you had to resolve a conflict with coworker?" What was the conflict about? How did you resolve? etc...
After clearing Phone interview. 5 rounds of virtual onsite were scheduled. I don't remember which question was asked in which round but below are the questions grouped by the category.
Coding questions
- Given a 2d matrix of 0 and 1 ( 0 denotes water and 1 denotes land). Find the size of island, given the initial coordinate
- Given 2 string s1 and s2 which represent a roman numeral compute their sum and return in roman numeral format
- Design an LRU cache
All the above questions are present in LC. Solved them without any problem.
System Design Question
Design the feature "Customers who bought this also bought".
Whenever a customer views an item, we look at the recent purchases of the customer who already bought this item. We would recommed those items to the present customer.
- How is the data created?
- How to rank the data?
- How do you scale across languages?
- How do you scale across regions?
- How does the online flow works? what stack to use?
- How do you shard the data?
Personally I felt I did this well, because I own a similar feature at my current work.
Object Oriented Design
Design a site where users would play a game of chess
- Define all the classes and their attributes.
- How do the classes communicate among themselves
- From a UX point of view, how is the view rendered?
Mostly the interview was concentrated on the Data Modelling side. I felt I've designed the classes well.
LP Questions
I feel this is where I've bombed.
-
Explain about something where you came up with an innovative solution.
-Why is it innovative? -
Describe a situation where you have tasken a risk
- What was the result?
- Why is it a risk?
- What steps have you taken to minimize the impact?
- What was your role in taking the risk?
- If you could have done it differntly what would you do?
- What's your learning?
-
Describe a situation when you had to choose one tech stack over other.
- How did you choose?
- What is you role in decision making?
-
Situation when you helped a teammate.
- How did you know they needed help?
- How did you help?
- Do you think you could have helped in a better manner? If yes how?
-
What's your biggest failure of your career? Why? What's the learning?
-
Describe a situation when you received a strong feedback.
- How have you responded?
- What steps have you taken about it?
-
Sitation where you put up an argument and lost
-
Sitation where you put up an argument and won
-
Something which you didn't like in the company/team and brought a change about it
- How did you pitch about this
- What was you role in decision making
-
Have you made a change which affected other teams working.
- How have you convinced them to accept your change
- how have they responded.
- What's your role in decision making
-
Something which you explored outstide work
- Why did you explore that
- What was your learning
- What efforts have you made to share your findings with team.
I think amazon expects every dev to be in complete control of the decisions. Many times, I was asked "What was your role in decision making". I've replied "it was a team decision, where we discussed the pros and cons of each approach"
Almost 70% of the overall time was spent on LP questions.
I got the reject mail after 3 days and they are not willing to share any feedback.
I felt that I answered all the technical questions very well. It's so frustrating not being able to know what went wrong.
- Is there anything I could do to improve next time?
- Is it a good idea to connect with the interviewers on linkedin and ask for their feedback?