Status: 4 YOE
Position: SDE 2 at Amazon
Location: Sunnyvale, CA
Date: Feb 22, 2020
TC: 296K
Online Assessment:
DFS problem ( Finding connected components)
Robot Bounded in Circle
LP (below) refers to Leadership Principles
Onsite:
Round 1: LP (Invent and Simplify, Handling Tight deadlines) and System Design
Round 2: LP (Invent and Simplify, When I stepped up and solved something that wasn't good) and Code Review - Bar Raiser round. In this round I was given a Java code and was asked to review the code like how I would do it in my daily job. It had multithreading as well. I reviewed it and pointed out the issues that were there in the code including but not limited to Variable names, good threading practices etc.
Round 3: LP(When I dived deep to solve an issue) and Word Search-1 & II
Round 4: LP(When I stepped up to solve something, Conflict with my manager) and Modification of Isomorphic Strings problem
Last year I attended Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Google and failed in all of them. Finally I was able to crack Amazon after 4 failed attempts in the last 4 years ! I think the biggest difference this time was I got some good interviewers who were not intimidating and I prepared a lot for LP and System Design.
A recruiter contacted me and this is a new program in Amazon called the Pathfinder program where I'll be interviewed for Amazon and then I can choose the team I want to ! I think this model is pretty much similar to Google.
For coding, I have been preparing since 2020 Jan. So the preparation for the last one year helped me a lot. The year 2020 was rough for me. I was not happy with the current job as they couldn't sponsor my Green Card. This was a relief to me finally !
For Leadership Principles, I would encourage to prepare 2 to 3 stories for the same leadership principle. I was asked the same leadership principle thrice. Somehow I managed to come up with an example on the fly ! I also wrote the stories in 10 to 15 sticky notes and then after each round, I removed the stickies from my table just to ensure that I dont accidentally tell the same stories. Amazon is basically looking for Data points from you during the interview process. Some data points are
- How do you keep customer in mind while designing something
- How do you handle failures
- How do you handle conflicts
- Are you a metrics driven person
For fellow leetcoders, I will say this: YOUR TIME WILL COME and don't lose hope because of failures. For System Design, please read Lyft, Yelp, Uber's Engineering blog and start internalizing the big system design topics like Reliability, Scalability, Falut Tolerance etc. I didnt tackle all these problems in my current job. But reading these blogs helped me to understand about how big System Design works in these companies. This link contains many companies engineering blog links: https://github.com/kilimchoi/engineering-blogs