Status: Full-stack Developer in a Non-tech company, BS CS Top 30 CS State University
Experience: 2 years
Position: SDE 1 at Amazon
Location: Seattle, USA
Date: FEB 2020

Interview Process

1. HR Phone call (Nov 2019) - A recruiter reached out through a phone call, just a few generic questions on my current job, skills and what I'm looking for.

2. Online Assessment(Dec 2019) - All questions were from https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/344650/Amazon-Online-Assessment-Questions . I almost passed all the tests (missed 2 test cases) but still got through to the next round.

3. Onsite Interview (This was in Feb, before the coronavirus outbreak)- There were four 45 mins-1hr rounds.

   Round 1: Interviewed by an SDE 2, he was super-friendly and helpful throughout the interview. First 15-20 mins were all behavioral questions, mostly LP related. Last 30 mins was a coding question (Leetcode Medium). Overall, this round went great!

   Round 2: Interviewed by SDE 2 and another SDE 1 was shadowing. They were both mostly just taking notes and didn't help out as much as the previous interviewer. First 15 mins was behavioral, next 30 mins was a coding question (LC Medium). I struggled a bit in this question but the interviewers helped out a little. I made a few mistakes in the process but corrected as we progressed. I took quite long and used up all the time(1hour) so didn't have time to go over edge cases and other questions. I wasn't really confident after this round, felt like it was 6/10.

   Round 3: Interviewed by the Hiring Manager. The first 30 mins were behavioural with questions like Tell me about a time when you have a difficult situation, conflict, solved a tough problem, ambiguity, etc. This was followed by a System design question, it completely threw me off as the recruiter had told me there wouldn't be any design questions as I'm interviewing for SDE1. However, the question wasn't too complicated - I asked plently of clarifying questions, proactively stated all use cases and edge scenarios. Felt like this round went pretty good, the manager gave good feedback to my answers and also had time to go over some questions I had for him.

   Round 4: This was a bar-raiser round. The interviewer was a senior software engineer, he was very friendly and made the interview feel more like a conversation. The first 20 mins were behavioral, again mostly focused on Leadership principles. The next 30 mins was a coding question (LC Medium), I did okay - but didn't have time to go over the edge cases, also struggled a bit to get the time complexity right. There wasn't time left for me to ask him any questions.

   Overall, I felt the whole onsite interview was around 7/10.. took too long on a couple rounds and wasn't sure what to expect.

Result: Got the offer within 4 days!

Preparation and Tips
LEETCODE FTW! Man, I can't stress this enough - practicing LC problems made all the difference. Also, Leetcode Premium is completely worth it, got 2/3 questions onsite from the list recommended in the premium section. It just helps give you some structure to your preparation, gives a set of questions you can practice instead of getting too overwhelmed by too many questions.
I only practiced questions from the "Explore" section on LC Premium and also all the questions from https://www.***/post/New-Year-Gift---Curated-List-of-Top-75-LeetCode-Questions-to-Save-Your-Time-OaM1orEU

So overall did about 100-120 questions with 70% focus on Medium level difficulty.

For the Behavioral rounds - Check out Dan Croitor on Youtube, his videos were really helpful. I created a few stories from my experience and incorporated Amazon's leadership principles into them. Moreover, I would advise to go through 30-40 Most asked behavioral questions from Amazon and be confident in your answers to these questions.

Lastly, there's always an element of luck in these interviews so don't think it's the end of the world if you get rejected, we either win or we learn - never loose. I'd like to thank all of you in Leetcode as reading your posts regularly during my preparation motivated me greatly and I hope this post helps some of you as well:)