Leetcode has been very helpful for me, so now it's my time to give back!

Education: BSc (Software Engineering)
Experience: 2.5 years
Position: SDE2 at Amazon
Location: Seattle

I was initially contact by a recruiter for AWS through LinkedIn. After a brief phone interview, I moved on to the Online Assessment (OA). Shortly after the OA, the recruiter followed up with me and scheduled me for an on-site interview (held remotely).

OA:

• 2 coding questions (see here for practice)
• Follow-up questions: explain your logic and state the time/space complexity

On-site (virtual):
All interviews were 30 minutes behavioral and 30 minutes technical. My descriptions will be generic due to NDA.

1. Find all segments within 2D grid (similar to LC: Number of Islands)
2. Merge N distributed queues into an output queue according to a set of rules (assumptions are placed on the input queues)
3. Grouping of N input strings if they can be shifted into each other (similar to LC: Group Shifted Strings)
4. System Design: Online voting platform

My takeaways:

• Amazon leadership principles (LP) are important!
  • Ensure you have at least two good stories for each LP
  • Avoid re-using stories
  • Back-up your stories with data. Amazon is very data-driven.
  • Be confident!
• Study the fundamentals, don't just grind Leetcode
  • Graphs, hashing, searching (dfs/bfs), etc.
  • Be aware of the trade-offs between solutions and data-structures, you need to justify your decisions
• Write clean, maintainable code
  • Minimizing line count does not matter. Make sure it's readable.
  • Explain how your code can be extended if the conditions change (e.g. input is now a never-completing queue instead of an array)
• Practice interviewing
  • Learn to talk when you code and explain your answers
  • Explain your thinking in a clear and concise manner
  • Be prepared to not succeed on every question. Showing interviewers how you think when you're stuck is important!
• Be resilient
  • If you struggle on one interview, don't let that stop you from succeeding on the rest
  • Each interview is a fresh-start, don't go on tilt!

Compensation: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/613068/Amazon-or-SDE2-or-Seattle