Status: 1 year exp, 8 month full time, MS CS Large State School
Position: SDE1 at Amazon
Location: Seattle, WA
Date: April 03, 2020

Manager (SDM) for AWS reached out to me on Linkedin a month before interview. I was interested and currently was grinding LC but nonchalant. Purchased LC premium and did a bunch of the Amazon specific ones from this post. I cannot stress enough how important Leadership Principals are to the interviews. Please have at least 2 or 3 stories with each and emphaize the LP while you speak. I went through the job posting and tried to guess which LPs I was going to be asked.

Beahviour Study Material:

1. Dan Croitor
2. Interview Genie

Coding Study:

1. Leetcode
2. Cracking the Coding
3. Elements of Programing Interivew

OA | March-ish
Luckily I had been doing the OA questions from this post

1. Min time to Merge Files
2. Treasure Island

I did well enought to have finished both with around 40 minutes to spare.

Virtual Onside
Meet with 4 total 1 hr each with 1 hr break.

1. LP for 30 mins. The Design a Reservation System. I tried to ask a lot of clarifying question about this system. I had read Cracking the Coding on OOP and System Design but I didnt feel like it was enough. Interviewer was somewhat satisfied (i think). We got through the whole problem.

2. Given a BST and a int value k, return the closes node value to k. My approach was to iterate through tree and calculate the abs difference between node val and k to store the one. It took me a while to understand what it was asking and I finally understood after running through a few examples. I asked a lot of clarifying questions and managed to get the optimal solution only after some help. Iterate left or right depending if k is larger or smaller than node.val. O(logn) time.

3. LP for 30 mins again. Binary Search Tree Iterator. Implement an iterator over a binary search tree (BST). I managed to get this one not only optimally, but had a few followups about if the BST was a stream with the next() function pointing the next value in Inorder position. I felt this interview go very well.

4. I belive this was the "Bar Raiser". Someone not on the team asked me LP for an hour. He asked me around 3 LPs with another 5 followup questions per each LP. I tried not to use the same answers as before but I was running out of stories to tell and ended up repeating my answers from some of the ones before.

Again, my recruiter told me that Coding was 55% of the decision and then LPs were 45%. Perform well in the LPs (STAR structure, demonstrate LP and have unique stories). I dont think I did well enough for an offer, but we will see next week.

Maybe next time.