YOE: ~1.25 as a junior SDE at a large company.
I went through a virtual onsite interview loop for an L3 SDE position at Amazon's Sunnyvale office. It consisted of four interviews:
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Interview with Hiring Manager (HM) - This interview was entirely behavioral where I was asked questions about past work experiences and expected to exhibit Amazon's leadership principles (LPs) in as many situations as I could. I practiced for LP questions, so overall I felt that I had a good conversation with the HM, who was engaged and pressed specific questions based on what I was saying (in other words, I could tell he was listening carefully as he asked his follow-ups). I'd rate myself 8/10 for this interview.
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Interview with L4 SDE - This interview started off with a couple of behavioral questions similar to the HM interview, but we didn't discuss too deeply. The remainder of this interview was technical as this was the object-oriented design (OOD) round. It was similar to a system design round, but more oriented towards code. I was given a high-level question, which was to describe the code/classes needed to simulate a very popular game that most people have probably played in their lifetime. Went over basic rules of the game, discussed the states of the game (the beginning, the randomness of it, the win/lose conditions, etc.), what class(es)/function(s) I would build to support the game, race conditions, algorithmic complexities, etc. The question wasn't necessarily hard, but it was just a lot of moving pieces to consider. The interviewer stressed that it wasn't necessarily required to have the full code at the end, but at the very least wanted me to think through the OOD aspect of it and some important pieces of code (such as dealing with a common edge case, how to instantiate an object, how to end the game, etc.). This was probably my poorest interview in my opinion; I was just overwhelmed with how much there was to consider. 5 or 6 out of 10.
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Interview with L4 SDE - This interview started off with a couple of behavioral questions like Interview 2. This question started off as a classic LC medium problem, but evolved into a more complex problem by adding more and more constraints (easily into hard). I did well in the beginning part of this interview, but as we got into the second half of it I got stuck a little more often and needed hints along the way. I didn't reach a solution at the end, but interviewer said it was fine since I had answered the beginning couple. But I know interviewer is saying this cause he's being nice and he's trained to not make me feel down. 6/10.
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Bar Raiser (BR) - The last interview was definitely the bar raiser interviewer. Started off with behavioral questions and asked for lots of detail similar to HM; also asked pressing follow-ups. The technical question that I received for this interview was simple enough. I explained and coded up the optimal solution, which I was able to provide in ample time. Bar raiser seemed satisfied with my approach and didn't provide hints, nor was he confused at any point of my explanation. I thought this interview went well, like 9/10.
Outcome: Got an email after 4 business days from my recruiter asking if I was free in an hour for a short call. Then during the call, the recruiter said that she is not able to share specific feedback and that the team had decided not to move forward with an offer. It didn't come as the greatest surprise to me since I personally knew that I performed weakly in Interviews 2-3, but also thought that maybe my performances with the HM+BR would compensate for those. Recruiter said I could apply again in 6 months and to connect on LinkedIn for future opportunities.
Tips:
- Make sure you know your fundamental DS&A
- Read about other people's experiences on the OOD round and practice those questions
- Don't skip preparing for LP questions. They were asked in every interview that I had, so make sure you have a good narration of your stories prepared in your mind. Also, make sure you have different examples since repeating things is frowned upon (if you are a new grad, then I think it's okay to do so but make sure you mention to your interviewer that you are repeating something).