Status: New grad with 1 year of prior Experience, MS in CS from Mid-Tier US university
Position: SDE1 at Amazon Alexa team
Location: Seattle, WA
Date: Feb 11, 2020

I had contacted someone working in Amazon Alexa in LinkedIn and they had referred me for the position. Just after one day of contacting them got a mail from the recruiter to complete the online assessment.

Online Assessment:
The online assessment had three parts :

• Coding Challenge(90 mins):
  • Number of Island (https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-islands/)
  • Connecting Cities with minimum cost (https://leetcode.com/problems/connecting-cities-with-minimum-cost/)
• Workstyle Survey (15 mins)
• Feedback Survey (5 mins)

Just after a day of completing the online assessment the recruiter contacted me back with an invite to the onsite interview. She had mentioned that she will schedule a call to discuss about the team and the interview process, also she had mentioned that she will schedule a coaching call with one of the Amazon SDEs, and both never happened.

Fast forwarding to the day before interview, I got an email from the recruiting coordinator saying one of my interview is cancelled, and now I have only 4 rounds of interview.

Onsite (4 rounds) :

• Round 1 (Coding, 1 hour):

  • Questions on Amazon Leadership Principles
  • Check if a binary tree has duplicate values (https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/check-binary-tree-not-bst-duplicate-values/)

• Round 2 (Behaviora with Hiring Manager, 1 hour):

  • Questions on Amazon Leadership Principles
  • Questions on my projects
  • Questions on my work experience

• Round 3 (Coding, 1 hour):
  Two interviewers were present for this interview. Both were asking followup questions.

  • Questions on Amazon Leadership Principles
  • Word Break II (https://leetcode.com/problems/word-break-ii/)

• Round 4 (Coding, 1 hour):

  • Questions on Amazon Leadership Principles
  • The Maze II (https://leetcode.com/problems/the-maze-ii/). He also wanted the path I take from start to end.

My thoughts:

• All the questions had appeared from Amazon tagged question in leetcode.
• Even for onsite they had sent me a livecode link to code, so they were expecting me to compile the code. And also time and space complexities were expected.
• All the onsite interviews were divided into 20 mins of LP and 40 mins of coding.
• Not asking OO Design or System Design questions felt strange to me, and also not sure whether its common that they cancel one of the interviews the day before the interview.

This is my 6th on-site rejection. Of all the interviews, I had done really well in this, and even the interviewers were appreciative of my solutions. And I was expecting to get an offer, but life isn't that easy. Not sure why I was rejected. I hope I will clear a interview one day.

Any suggestion on how I can improve is appreciated.

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better