Status: Senior Student, BS CS from no name Canada school
Position: SDE Intern at Amazon
Location: Vancouver, BC
Date of Offer: Jan 5th, 2022
I had done three internships prior to this, was in a student design team and went to a lot of hackathons (winning 5 of them). I applied online for general Software Development Internship. I had applied before and did not get the offer around a year ago. I applied early November 2020 and got the OA around 2 weeks later. I did the second part of the OA around a week later and recieved an invite for the final interview first week of December 2020. My intervied was scheduled for mid December and I got the offer in early Jan 2022.
Online Assessment Part 1 (90 min): (Mid-Late November)
Previously I had to do a debugging question, but this time it was just two questions. I did both questions in Python3.
- Q1 - I don't remember the exact question, but I remember it being a DP related question. Most likely a medium. I passed all cases. Luckily I was reviewing DP/graphs the night before so that came in handy for this question
- Q2 - Was similar to Merge Intervals. I passed 70% of the cases for this question. I worked on the most optimal method.
Online Assessment Part 2 (1.5 hours): (Late November)
- This was the dreadful work simulation which was pretty much common sense imo. I do know of people who have failed because of this, so if you feel like you might not be as strong in this, I'd recommend reviewing it
- I think it recommends 90 minutes for the work sim, but I'd give yourself more time. Try to actually think out what you would do in a workplace and you would be benefiting the company
Final Interview on Chime (1 hour): (Mid December)
- I don't know why on earth they use Chime, but it was a pretty simple program to use
- I was asked some Leadership Principal questions in the beginning
- Name a time where you were working with others and you conviced them to work on a solution that you thought might work better.
- Have you disagreed with someone for a project and how did you go about working together with the other person to solve the issue.
- Tell me about a time where you failed to meet a deadline
- Tell me a time when you did not have enough data and had to make a decision. How and why did you make this decision?
- After the interviewer was happy with my answers we went onto the coding question
- The question I got was Treasure Island. Its apparently similar to this Walls and Gates but I brought my thought process from Number of Islands
- I asked a lot of questions and started writing comments on how I would solve this question so the interviewer knew what I was trying to do
- I had asked to run the code, but was not allowed so we used examples to check if my solution worked
- After the coding part, I was allowed to ask questions and just asked the interviewer on how he got to Amazon and their impact within their team
- The interviewer was really calm and genuinly just a fun person to talk to, we got along great. We ended up talking for 15min extra and just chatting a bit
Result: I got the offer first week of Jan, 2022. I was somewhat confident I had gotten the offer because of how my last interview went but started to worry around new years. Overall I would say it was a positive experience. If anyone wants to prep for this kind of interview, I would say focus on arrays, dp and graph/tree questions as I thought those helped me out the most. Some say if you do easy and a couple mediums it would be fine, but I found most of the questions I did were similar to medium questions. Its really just RNG.
Hope this helps someone.