Status: 1 Year 3 Month Exp at an Investment Bank
Position: System Development Engineer 1 (L4) at Amazon
Location: Chennai, India
Date: Sept, 2024
Applied to tons of jobs at career site, all without referral, and got OA for Amazon Prime's team.
OA Round
2 coding questions, followed by typical Amazon's behavioral questions. Coding questions were very weird, they were very long implementation based, but could be converted to very short if used scripting languages like Python or JS. I used JS (instead of CPP, which is my primary lang), cleared both questions, all test cases passed.
Result - Cleared, got interview call in next week. Interview 1 & 2 got scheduled together.
Interview Round 1
Was a round focused on problem solving, was asked easy but long implementation based question. The interviewer was keen in the code quality and evaluated on factors of maintainablility, scalablilty and did not expect any optimisation in terms of time or space. Few typical questions around Amazon's LP were also asked.
Question - Given a file consisting of many lines, each line consisting of many words, find longest word that matches a given pattern. (No constraints provided, no optimisation needed, as mentioned above, focus was on code structure, maintainability and extensibility)
Interview Round 2
Started with typical questions around Amazon's LP, related to work exp and projects, and then moved to problem solving and linux scripting. Few scripting questions like how do you find a pattern in file, how to find files in directory, etc, and few standard shellscript questions, followed by a medium level dsa question.
DSA Question was similiar to - "minimum-number-of-platforms-required-for-a-railway"
Note - Shadowing interviewer interfered in my approach at the end of interview, stating it was wrong on few cases. The interviewer did a run, and turned out it was working fine, the shadowing interviewer did some mistake. It did panic me out but the result was not impacted.
Result - Both rounds cleared, HM was scheduled next week.
HM Round
Discussed prev experience, and several questions around Amazon's LP. Followed by questions related to computer networks, linux commands and troubleshooting. Few examples are - How DNS works? What happens when you visit Amazon[dot]com in your browser (how request goes)? How can you troubleshoot a website which is not reachable? How to send SMTP via shellscript?
Result - HM Round cleared, Bar Raiser was scheduled.
Bar Raiser Round
Started with couple of LP questions. Followed by a LLD problem of Parking Lot (variation - multiple parking lots within one system). And spent last 10 mins on how to deploy it, how to scale, where do we expect traffic, how to get rid of SPOFs in system, which DB to use, where Load Balancers are expected?
Note - Wasn't imformed about a system design round, and was a surprise for a few friends working at Amazon, as L4/SDE1/SysDE1 are not expected these rounds. However, didn't impact me as I had prepared beforehand for interviews at few startups.
Result - Went pretty well, was able to code completly and I felt that the interviewer was statisfied by approach and answers.
Verdict
Got the offer after 2 weeks.
Compensation Details