I solved an OA and and went through 4 hour of interviews with Amazon. The job is for an EU location tagged under 'Amazon Retail' in Amazon Jobs. I am a new M.Sc. grad from a prestigious school in Europe with multiple internship experience. I am non-EU however, and studied B.Sc. in my home country.
I received an email from a very nice recruiter after months I applied on Amazon website. I was given an OA.
- https://leetcode.com/problems/k-closest-points-to-origin/
- https://leetcode.com/problems/shortest-path-to-get-food
Weirdly, one of the test cases for the first problem was wrong. At least, I see it that way. I did some stupid hack to pass that specific test case by debugging. They want you to describe your solution after you are done with the problem.
Then we had almost an hour long talk with the recruiter. I was asked CS fundamentals such as trees, BST, DFS, BFS, etc. I think one can invest in communication skills when describing tech-related concepts to recruiters. Then I was asked some LP questions. Honestly, I do not remember LPs at this round but the recruiter was nice and knew I am new grad so I was allowed to take a minute to think about situations from industry, academia, etc.
The recruiter arranged a 4-hour interview with a lunch break. I do not remember the order of the rounds but it was something like:
1st Round:
https://leetcode.com/problems/jump-game/
I solved it very naive first, and then through the talking I realized the constant space linear time solution to this problem. The interviewer seemed like he was looking for a solution with DFS+memo, which would actually be worse than the solution I arrived at.
2nd round:
It was an OOD question where they have some Amazon devices, and they want you to show the power status. There can be different types of devices, and some of them may have batteries, and some may not. The indicator can use speakers, screen, etc. to let the customer know about the power status.
I think I saw something similar on LC Discuss so I am sure some people must recognize this question. I was not prepared for Amazon and I didn't even study OOD at all but took my time to solve lots of Mediums. Nowadays, however, the expectations are high so even for new grads, high-level design, or OOD is desired.
This round was average at best in terms of self-evaluation.
3rd Round:
They have some packages to install on a system and you are given the dependencies for a package. Decide a Package class/entity, etc. so that you can install all packages on the system. This question was weird because you wouldn't understand what was asked. It was not an OOD round, so I assumed they were looking for a topological sort algorithm on a graph. I proposed a function and implemented it. There were follow-ups here.
4th Round:
The question was something like each customer visits the Amazon website, and you must return the first customer with the visit count 1. I used an OrderedDict + set to achieve the task.
The recruiter told me over the phone that I was rejected and can re-apply in the future. I guess, I was expecting this because I did not target this company and practice OOD & LP. None of the codes were required to compile and run, but some interviewers explicitly stated they want production level quality. Well good luck with that in 25 minutes. The interviewers were also coming from different backgrounds, there were 2 non-CS people. At each round, there was also an LP question. As far as I remember, they were:
A time when,
- a team member was not functioning.
- there was a problem with your customer.
- you had a tight deadline, and you had to sacrifice the quality of your product, or something like this.
- you had to dig deep, or something like this.
I personally like the Amazon as a company because they provide jobs for people. They are big, and probably the easiest to get into amongst FAANG. If you can survive there after joining, I am sure it would open lots of doors. On the downside though, they have a notorious thing with PIPs but I am not sure if it applies to EU where worker rights are somewhat more established. Also, when I talked to the interviewers, I did not get excited about the job, nobody actually told me in detail what they were working on specifically. It felt weird. I am curious to know which jobs in Amazon are cool, and which are not.