Background
Status: 10 + YOE
Position: SDE II at Amazon
Location: Remote, US
Date: April 2022
Online Screen
Technical
There were 2 questions which were lengthy to read and understand. However once you understand what needs to be done, the coding was not lengthy. Platform- HackerRank. The platform has test cases and if time/space complexity doesn't meet, test cases fail. What worked well was that I solved by brute force, then started optmization. The input format of test cases at HackerRank can be confusing if you are coming straight from leetcode.
Behavioral
Some work life related situational questions. Yes, they ask behavioral as part of screen itself.
Onsite
Recruiter agreed to give me 2 months to prepare for the onsite.
There were 4 rounds. Each round had behavioral mixed with either coding and/or design. TL;DR, there was not much focus on DSA or optimization of time/space complexity, rather problem solving techniques for some real life situation like problems. Coding difficulty level was easy~medium
Round 1
Focus Area: System Design
Time: 40 min
Question: Design some high traffic event based system.
Nothing special about this round. Typical practice on grthedesign would be sufficient
Round 2
Focus Area: DSA
Time: 20min
Question: Twisted version of Graph/Tree traversal
Took some time to understand the pattern required to traverse the tree. In the hindsight, two things that I could done better-don't continously talk. They say think out loud, but doesn't mean non-stop talking. I think it may be okay to take a pause for a few seconds, collect your thoughts and resume. What actually matters is that if you arrived at the solution expected by interviewer in the alloted time.
Round 3
Focus Area: Low Level Design
Time: 30 min
Question: Closest LC question is design a tic tac toe
First of all, I got surprised since looking at leetcode tagged questions, one may get impression that type of question would be a DSA, however it was a different quite open ended question. I spent a lot of time in understanding what needs to be done. That left me with less time to code. In the hindsight, I believe if you are given a question like, 'design...', that means they are looking for how you understand it quickly, make assumptions, clarify what needs to be focussed on, come up with low level design a.k.a functions, classes, etc. and a test code with some sample inputs that you can imagine.
Round 4
Focus Area: Low Level Design/Testing
Time: 30min
Questions: Similar to Round 1.
I couldn't believe they did it again!
Outcome
Rejected, not given offer to downgrade, since I've more experience.
Final Thoughts
I started leetcode 2 years ago and when for the first time a Amazon recruiter reached out, she advised to prepare for leetcode medium and hard questions. Little did I imagine that when I'd get a chance for full onsite, I'll no question similar to the ones at leetcode. Amazon is unique in this regard. Now, my guess is that either it depends upon the team, what type of questions they decide to ask e.g. DSA or LLD. It's also possible internationally Amazon focuses mostly on DSA, but in the U.S., it's a different, I'm not sure. May be readers can comment!
My preperation strategy had been to go over Amazon tagged questions, practice them based a topic tag and how many times its been asked at Amazon. Obviously that strategy failed big time. I could have waited another year to go over rest of the Amazon tagged questions and still I would have got the same outcome in the interview. If you are in a similar situation like me- full time job with a toddler at home, you want an optimized prepration strategy. So my take away is to not just prepare from leetcode, but also prepare on LLD. Apart from that, Amazon does focus a lot on Leadership Principles(LP), so prepare examples for these LPs. It will help you retain focus for the technical portions of the interviews. In one round half of the time was spent in several follow ups on the LP questions.
Thank you for reading and hope that helps!