Hello fellow leeters!
Status: Currently employed as Software Developer at a Research Lab in a renowned university.
Total Exp: 5 years
Position: SDE2 at Amazon Alexa
Location: Multi. It was a generic role for Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Seattle and Virginia HQ2. Based on team matching, can choose location.
Leetcode has been greatly helpful to me in my preparation and keeps me pushing forward. When I started preparing for this interview, I was totally out of touch that I basically even forgot how recursion used to work. The leetcode courses and the leetcode discuss section really helped me to get the fundamentals right. So special thanks to the leetcode community.
Process:
I was contacted by the recruiter on LinkedIn and I got the call in January and started with the online assessment.
OA:
2 coding questions - Variation of rotten oranges + variation of top n-buzz words
After clearing OA, I got a call from HR for on-site. I told that I needed time for preparation. The HR was very understanding and gave me the time to prepare well until last week which is when I had given my on-site.
Virtual On-site:
I had 4 rounds of interviews with 45 minutes each round. All the interviewers were extremely friendly and interactive throughout the interview process and I thoroughly enjoyed the process. I signed an NDA so I will keep the questions as vague as possible.
All the interviews below had 20 minutes of LP questions. So be thoroughly prepared with it. This is extremely important. LPs provide the data to the interviewers as to why they can reject few candidates. So take time and prepare well. Do not give any major red flags here. Spend at least 3 days coming up with examples to match the LPs. They will all be confusing and overlapping, but practice well and try to differentiate between them. One or 2 examples can be repeated in interviews, but make sure you dont repeat the same answer in 3 different interviews out of 4/5. I had prepared 7 different examples for 8 different LPs and made sure I don't repeat them.
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System design round - 20 minutes system design question. The question was based on one of the products that the interviewer worked at. This didn't go well as expected, the tool to draw an architecture diagram was hard to use as and when new constraints were added during the course of interview. You can't freely go with your thoughts. Even though you practiced using this tool a couple of times, you wont be comfortable with it as you do not use this on a daily basis.
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Algorithms - DFS problem. This is not there on leetcode as is, but it is a variation of one of the problems here on leetcode. It is a simple, straight-forward & a classic DFS problem. I nailed this round, thought I covered everything here.
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Problem solving - Sorting problem. Again a variation of a problem found on leetcode. I asked few clarifying questions and gave the brute force solution, then told we can solve in in a better time complexity. Provided the right data structure, but I was stuck at one point. I needed couple of hints from the interviewer, but eventually solved the problem and explained the time complexity well. I thought this interview went well and we had a good time actually working together and solving this problem.
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Logical & Maintainable, OO Design - Couldn't find this on leetcode or anywhere, it was based on file system and some filter for retrieving files. I provided the basic classes, interface, enums and also added comments to every thing I could find. Named the functions and variables in such a way that it was easy to read. This round was ok to me, neither bad nor good as there is no correct answer.
Overall, I thought the whole experience was positive. However, HR told me that they are not moving forward with the process. I felt very down as the HR gave me the news and started feeling really depressed as I had consistently put so much of efforts since January. Was preparing late nights till 3:00 AM almost for the last 2 months. And to top this, I did well on my coding rounds as I found them quite easy and I am pretty sure I wouldn't get such questions again. Al of thisl for a rejection!
I had solved 273 Leetcode questions - 123 easy, 135 - medium, 15 - hard. No matter how many questions you solve, everything has to fall in place to get the interviews right and land the offer. I had also studied system design and object oriented design from *** courses for 2 weeks.
Anyway, would like to thank the leetcode community for everything. All I can do is try to be positive and move on. It is very hard, but I have no option. I have Microsoft on-site lined up, but my Amazon failure/rejection literally broke my heart. I am trying my best to get back to the preparation grind again. To top this, due to the COVID situation not many companies are hiring right now, so everything is challenging. I wish nothing but the best for everyone interviewing.
Prep materials that I found myself and from our leetcode community that was really helpful to me:
https://www.***.org/must-coding-questions-company-wise/#amazon - Geeks for Geeks
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw0uQHve23oMWgQcTTpgQsQ
https://interviewsteps.com/blogs/news/amazon-leadership-principles-interview
https://leetcode.com/discuss/general-discussion/458695/dynamic-programming-patterns/439810
https://github.com/viraptor/reverse-interview/blob/master/README.md
https://medium.com/@nick.ciubotariu/ace-the-coding-interview-every-time-d169ce1fd3fc#_blank
https://github.com/resumejob/system-design-algorithms
https://www.swecareers.com/most-frequently-asked-interview-questions/Amazon
https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/437082/Amazon-Behavioral-questions-or-Leadership-Principles-or-LP
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMCXHnjXnTnvo6alSjVkgxV-VH6EPyvoX
*** i/o website- system design & object oriented design.