Status: 1 YOE, BS non-CS, US News top 30
Position: SDE1 at Amazon
Location: Arlington, VA
Date: January 31, 2019

A recruiter reached out to me around October, got an invitation to a local networking event, and was able to skip the phone screen and went straight to onsite. This was not for a specific team, so it's 4x50 min rounds. I have 1 YOE, but my recruiter wanted to put me through the SDE2 loop anyway, hence system design round; offer was for SDE1. Team matching will likely happen soon.

I signed an NDA so this will be pretty vague- sorry!

Round 1: SDM + SDE3 (shadowing)

• LP: disagree and commit, a LOT of follow-up questions about details
• Coding: didn't find it on LC, it was a string question, got asked about time complexity

Round 2: SDM Bar raiser

• System design: a spin on a very typical design question, mostly focusing on the big picture architecture of a client facing application, be prepared about typical components of an applications and talk about trade-offs of design decisions
• LP: bias for action/deliver results, learn and be curious

Round 3: SDE3 (?) + SDM (shadowing)

• LP: bias for action, invent and simplify
• Coding: LC medium in the top 100 amazon questions involving strings/search, again got asked about time complexity

Round 4: SDE3

• LP: Vocally self-critical (I think). This LP round was such a blur I honestly can't remember much
• Coding: a spin on a LC hard related to sorting

If I had to prepare all over again I would definitely try to come up with more examples for LP- kinda ran out of stories at the end. Leetcode was super helpful and premium was definitely worth it! I bought CTCI and EPI python, and went through the knowledge part, but didn't do any of the questions. I think EPI python was more helpful since it taught me about a lot of native python packages that I had no idea about before (my day-to-day job is mostly java but I'm more comfortable with python).

On leetcode I mostly went through the top 100 amazon tagged problems/the amazon explore section, as well as this list: https://leetcode.com/list/xoqag3yj/ (came from blind 75 question list, link got censored)

For LP, I watched Dan Croiter on youtube, and read https://medium.com/@scarletinked/are-you-the-leader-were-looking-for-interviewing-at-amazon-8301d787815d.

For system design, I skimmed through https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer, but I would say most of my answers during the interview came from my existing knowledge from my work experience.

No on-site lunch (frugality, lol), but amazon did give me $65 for per diem. I live near HQ2 so I didn't have to travel much, but they do arrange travel for you if you're out of the area.