About Me: 8 years of experience with expertise in distributed computing.
Online Assessment:

• Slight variation of https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum
• BFS question similar to Treasure Island
• I solved those optimally with 30 mins to spare.

L6 Phone Screen:

• LP: Describe your most impactful project.
• https://leetcode.com/problems/trapping-rain-water/
• I really liked the interviewer, I could tell he is very talented. This interview was also went really well. However, the interviewer did not think I will be raising the bar for the L6 level. I was disappointed. The recruiter asked me if I want to come in for L5, which I agreed to do.

Onsite Round 1: Design Question (By a manager)

• LP: Give me an example of when you showed initiative and took the lead.
• LP: Tell me about one of your recent projects.
• Design LinkedIn.
• It went well, I think. The interviewer was not very responsive, so it was hard for me to tell if he liked the solution or not.

Onsite Round 2: Coding (By a manager)

• LP: Give an example of a tough or critical piece of feedback you received.
• LP: Talk about a time you disagreed with a plan of action.
• https://leetcode.com/problems/course-schedule-ii
• It went very well too.

Onsite Round 3: Coding (By the Bar Raiser)

• LP: Tell me about a decision for which data and analysis weren’t sufficient to provide the right course and you had to rely on your judgment and instincts.
• LP: Tell me about a time when you were wrong.
• https://leetcode.com/problems/first-unique-character-in-a-string/
  • Follow-up: What if instead of a string it is a continuous stream. Can you return the 1st unique char at a given time? (meaning can you do it in one pass?) I did it using a queue.
• https://leetcode.com/problems/implement-strstr/
  • Follow-up: How to make the implementation linear O(n + m)?
  • Follow-up: What if the big string is sorted.
• It went really really well.

Onsite Round 4: Coding (By a Senior Engineer)

• LP: Tell me about a time when you had to step up and disagree with a team members approach.
• LP: If your direct manager was instructing you to do something you disagreed with, how would you handle it?
• It was a open ended question, similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/reorder-log-files. I was having hard time understanding what the interviewer wanted. At the end, I came up with a resonable solution and the interviewer seemed to be ok with it.
• I ended up getting an offer for the team of this interviewer. So, I guess it was not as bad as I thought.

Two hours after the intervew, I received a phone call from the recruiter telling me they will be extending an offer.

Offer Details: $210K($155K base/$50Kbonus/reststock).Sametotalcompfor4yearswithdifferentratio.Therecruitertoldmethattheycangoupto$240K. I rejected the offer since it was below my expectations (which was $350).

I must say, I had a great experience interviewing at Amazon. The recruiting team was phenomenal and the conversations with the interviewers were really great.