Status: BS in Computing + 3 YOE.
Position: SDE at Amazon
Location: Seattle, WA
Last interview date: July 10, 2019

Online Assesment: (1.5 hours (if not mistaken))

• I can't remember the first question.
• The second question was very similar to Treasure Island, it was about a robot who wants to remove an obstacle from an MxN grid. It had obstacles where he can't move and I needed to return shortest distance or -1 if not applicable.
• After the two questions, I had to write down my thinking about the two questions and then provide the time and space complexity of my algorithms.

Phone screen 1: (1 hour)

• Two behavioural questions:
  • Tell me about a time when you couldn't meet a time commitment.
  • Tell me about a time when you compromised a short time success for a long time success (can't remember the wording exactly)
• Technical questions:
  • Find if a string has valid parantheses: https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-parentheses
  • Interviewer showed me a Fibonnaci Recursive function and told me to find what's wrong in it: https://leetcode.com/problems/fibonacci-number
  • Split an array into two seperate arrays with equal sum: https://leetcode.com/problems/partition-equal-subset-sum but also with negative numbers

Phone screen 2: System Design + Behavioural (1 hour)

• Tell me about the hardest project you worked on.

• System Design:

  • Design a system to create promotions for users selling an item. For example: User X is selling an item priced 100$.AmazonwouldcontactXaskinghimtomakead$ for X where p is a an amount of money less than d which is the discount percentage value.
  • During the interview, my interviewer focused a lot on the database design and even asked me to write a select query and an update query.

• In the last 15 minutes, the interviewer came back to ask me about the project I described in the first question and if I could tell him about the algoirthm I used. The project is an OCR library to read amount out of bank checks automatically. The interviewer was interested about how did I go from cleaning the image until reading the amount. I tried to explain the algorithms I used and the design I created as fast as possible since we only had 15 minutes left.

• Overall Experience:

1. I didn't really like how things went in the second phone screening when everything was around the database, but I enjoyed talking about my own design of something I created.
2. The worst experience I had is the next:
   • 24 hours after the second phone screening, I received an email saying that I passed my interviews and that I am invited to continue interviewing on site. I was very thrilled about the news and very happy.
   • I went to sleep that night really excited (there's a 10 hours difference between where I live and Seattle), and I woke up to another email where the recruiter is appologizing for sending me the wrong email and that I wasn't actually selected for the onsite interview and to apply again in 6 months. No one was CCed in both emails and it really hurt to be rejected in this unprofessional way (in my opinion).