Education : BSc in CSE
YOE : 4
Position: SDE2 at Amazon
Date: March, 2021
Leetcode : 80 easy / 170 medium / 30 hard Online Assesment:
Applied via amazon job portal. A recruiter contacted via email and asked for suitable date to sit for OA. Took the OA at the beginning of January.
Two problem was given along with two additional questions of writing the thought process and time space complexity.
First problem was related to Heap data structure. Can be classifed as LC easy.
Second problem was related to graph. Little bit tough it was i guess. I would say LC Medium/Hard category.
Phone Interview
Got an email within a week that they would like to have a phone interview with me. I scheduled for late January.
Asked bunch of LP related questions,current job roles/responsibilities and some pretty easy DS questions related to HashMap and LinkedList. Also some software engineering questions. Didn't give any problem to solve via live code although there was a link given in the email. Felt pretty weird though about this.
Interview session was one hour. Interviewer was warm, cordial.
Virtual Onsite
Got an email within a week that i got select for onsite. I took one month time to prepare ans scheduled for onsite at the beginning of march. Total 5 round was taken.
1st Round : System Design
Spent first half hour asking bunch of LP questions.
Then 15 minustes about the sytem design of one of my current work projects.
After then I was given their system design problem. It was related to an amazon web service and its mission critical type logs managment. I used draw io to present my design. Interviewer raised different scenario like what happens when this service/component fails, how do you handle this/that failure scenario etc. I modified my design answering this questions.
Overall I was happy with the session. Interviewer was very nice and my dear type person.
2nd Round : OOD Design
Spent first half hour asking bunch of LP questions.
He then presented the problem. A file system search like problem with future extension keeping in mind that search criteria can change in future. I bombed this round. My mind for some no apparent reason went blank :( After seeing me struggling for a bit he changed the problem description. Told me to focus only on the logic part rather than OOD part. I then solved as it was pretty easy the core logic part.
I think this round might have cost me the rejection. Interviwer was nice, warm, cordial.
3rd Round : Problem Solving
Spent first half hour asking bunch of LP questions.
Asked some DS related questions like how HashMap works, binary tree, self balancing binary tree and their algos.
A flood fill type image pixel related problem was given. Pretty easy actually if you have solved any kind of flood filling problems in leetcode. I used BFS and quickly wrote the code. Then interviewer changed some descriptions, criteria. Also modified the code with these changes. Asked for some test cases and provied what was on top of my head.
This round went well. Interviwer was nice, warm, cordial.
4th Round : Team Manager
I actually don't know his role. From the questions I am guessing he is in managerial positions. Spent Full One hours asking LP realated questions, my current roles/responsibilites and presented different scenario to check how I would handle those scenario.
Overall it went OK. Interviwer was OK.
5th round : Problem Solving
Spent first half hour asking bunch of LP questions.
Then a problem was given related to combinations/backtracking like problems. Almost similar to a popular leetcode backtrack problem. Coded the solution pretty fast. Interviewer seemed happy and asked some questions.
Overall I was happy with the session. Interviewer was very nice and my dear type person.
Final Result :
Recruier contacted me within a week and told me I got rejected. My LP round was great as per recruiter but got rejected due to technical reasons.
Didn't provide the technical rounds feedback(would have been great if got feedback)
Cooldown period is six mothns. And wished me good luck.
I wish you all good luck with your interviews and hope this post will help you a little bit in your journey.
Thanks.
Note: "I willingly didn't disclose the locations for a reason."