Status : 1 yoe
Position: SDE1 at Amazon
Location: Seattle
Date: December 5, 2020
I'm kinda late posting this, but I wanted to share my experience. my interview process was all online, and there were 3 rounds of interviews:
- recruiter screening
- hackerrank questions
- 4 rounds of virtual onsite
Phone Screening
to start the interview process, a recruiter reached out to me and asked for a phone call. the first interview was really relaxed and the recruiter was really easy to talk to. this was just basic screening questions.
Hackerrank coding challenge
for the hackerrank questions, they were almost directly from the leetcode amazon section. the questions were leetcode medium to hard and they asked me to explain my reasoning/run time for each solution I gave. I actually ended up missing a test case or two for the coding challenge so they bumped me down from an SDE2 to an SDE1. I thought this was better than just outright rejecting me.
Virtual onsite
now that I was interviewing for an SDE1 position, I didn't need to do system design. instead, i did an OO design interview which was relatively easy and common sense based. the interviewer was really nice as well.
for the bar raiser interview, they asked a bunch about my projects and previous experience. one thing i will say about amazon interviewers is they dig REALLY deep into your experience. normally for interviews, people just ask me how i did something and then would move on. for amazon, they asked followup questions so they actually understand how complex your project was. i dont think you can fake this, so come prepared with technical details.
the two technical interviews i had were divided into two parts (leadership principles questions and coding challenges). the leadership principle questions are "tell me about a time when...", and they really want data to back up most answers you give. the coding challenges were more or less directly from the amazon medium leetcode section and were dfs algorithms. one interviewer was not super interested in our conversation and was hard to talk to, but the other one was really great.
at the end of it i ended up getting an offer.
Overall Prep Tips
to prepare for this, i recommend doing the top 20 amazon leetcode questions as well as mixing in the overall popular questions. i also did a bunch of mock interviews with friends/family.
the leadership principle questions matter A LOT for amazon, and i recommend preparing ~4 stories that embody multiple leadership principles. you can generally change the perspective on your stories to answer most all "tell me about a time when..." questions, but generally i would recommend having at least one that shows how you worked through a conflict. lastly, amazon really wants data to justify the outcomes you had. it doesn't need to be super precise, but it needs to be measurable.
if you are willing to pay for prep, of course use leetcode :). second, i recommend https://www.interviewcake.com as they are really detailed in helping walk you through getting a solution and it can help you start to recognize patterns (this might be a good place to start). another service I liked was https://www.codocado.com as you can't beat real mock interviews. it was a tad expensive, but they gave me feedback on what i needed to work on afterwards which was helpful.
all in all, just do your best and learn from your mistakes. I failed many interviews and this was my second time interviewing with amazon. just because you fail on an interview, DOES NOT mean you are a bad engineer. it just means you need to learn from your mistakes and prepare more the next time, and that's okay.
best of luck everyone!