Status: New grad, CS from Tier 2 university in India
Experience: 5 months internships in startups
Position: SDE (New grad) at Amazon
Location: Berlin, Germany
Date: April, 2020
Solved Leetcode: 80 Easy, 116 medium, 21 Hard

I have learned a lot from the Leetcode community. Now it's my time to give back.

Timeline

• Applied on Amazon Jobs in Jan 2020
• Got Onilne Assessment link (3 parts) each receieved after successful completion of previous one (later half of Jan 2020)
  • First part: Debugging (7/7)
  • Second part: Coding - 2 Leetcode(LC) medium problems (all test cases passed) followed by a small work style assessment
  • Third part: Work environment simulation followed by logical ability test
• received notification of passing the assessments on beginning of March 2020
• received mail on scheduling of interview on beginning of April 2020
• Virtual onsite interview scheduled later half of April 2020
• Received Offer 7 days later

Virtual Onsites

Round 1:

The interviewer was cool. The interview started with the 20-25 minutes of Amazon's Leadership Principle(LP) questions(a.k.a behavioural questions). Moved on to the coding part. The coding question was a LC Medium on Binary Tree which can be solved by DFS and the follow up was to implement the same for n-ary Tree. After coding, again one of more LP question since he was not much satisfied with the previous ones.

Round 2:

This was OOPS design round. First 20 minutes on the LP questions(2 questions). After that a common question of oops design on making a game. I kept asking a lot of questions which the interviewer was not much into answering. Thought if I got rejected, it would be mostly be because of this round.

Round 3:

The round started with two of the LP question which took around 30 minutes. Then a LC easy question on array which I solved blazingly fast as I was hoping for follow up question. To my suprise there was no follow up and the interview ended early and I got the opportunity to talk about the Amazon's culture and working at Amazon in general.

Key Takeaways

• LC community helped immensely with different list of company tagged questions.
• You must definitely practice Amazon's LP question in advance. Prepare two personal stories for each of the 14 principles and answer them in STAR format(highly recommend Dan Croitor's youtube channel).
• Try solving each LC question with different approaches if possible.
• Sometimes you've got to be on the right place at the right time.
• Setbacks are a part of the process and learn to live through them.

Compensation: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/607360/Amazon-or-SDE(New-Grad)-or-Berlin