Position: SDE2 at Amazon
Location: Seattle, WA
Date: March 26, 2021

Technical Screen (1hr)

https://leetcode.com/problems/concatenated-words/

Notes: Finished it with 20 mins to spare, did well.

Virtual On-site (Full day, 4 interviews, breaks in between some)

Round 1: Leadership Principles + System Design w/ Hiring Manager

Tell me about a time you lost a customer's trust (Earn Trust)
How would you design a notification system for Amazon that could send e-mails / SMS at scale?

Notes: Did well. Really clicked with Hiring Mananger and explored a lot for the system design.

Round 2: Leadership Principles + Coding (Data structures and Algorithms)

Tell me about the most challenging problem you solved. (Dive Deep)
Write code to determine the most popular items. Assume your service is notified of purchase events { userId, itemId, time }

Notes: Started off with a simple solution that kept an in memory table for counts, progressed to using a priority queue.

Round 3: Leadership Principles + Coding (Problem Solving)

Tell me about a past project

Given a dictionary of word and a series of number input, find all the valid words the input can present?
# 1: [], 2: [ABC], 3: [DEF], 4: [GHI], 5: [JKL], 6: [MNO], 7: [PQRS], 8: [TUV], 9: [WXYZ], 0: []
# example: func({ dog, fog }, 364) -> [dog, fog]

Notes: The behavioral caught me off guard because it seemed like an unrelated question while interviewer was sorting out technical difficulties. There were a lot of follow up questions and it ended up being the main course. For coding section, went through brute force and then optimal solution. Think coding ended up well.

Round 4: Leadership Principles + Coding (Logical and Maintainable) - Bar Raiser

Tell me about an impactful project that you've recently worked on
Write code for a service that sends notifications (like System Design part but code it up)

Notes: Was hard to read the interviewer and I was not confident with results after.

Final Thoughts

Recruiter emailed a day after debrief to inform on rejection. Upon request for feedback was told that it could have been coding. Either solution was too complex or not enough qualifying questions.