Status: Backend software engineer 3 yrs
Position: SDE2 at Amazon
Location: Toronto, ON
Date: Q2, 2020

I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn and given an online assessment.

Leetcode experience:
Amazon premium questions
Some other starred questions
Dynamic Programming Patterns (from that post)

Online Assessment (2 questions):
One medium, one hard. After completing the amazon premium questions I found one of the problems very simple, but the other problem was difficult and I solved it with a brute force, which apparently was good enough.

Phone calls:
After completing the online assessment the recruiter called me and asked me about my job and what I do in my day to day. I answered him in STAR format as best as I could, but this was a more informal interview so that wasn't necessary. However, this was much more of an interview than I expected, in that he wanted a lot of details about my job and it seemed very important that I had driven key aspects. After this call, there was about a week waiting period, after which I had another phone call with him to clarify things from the other call. He wanted to be sure that I had driven some of the features I talked about. So again, huge emphasis here on being a driver of features/implementations/systems etc.

After the phone calls they invited me straight to the onsite - no technical phone call.

Onsite (4 rounds):
Due to COVID this was a virtual onsite which I was very anxious about. I would always prefer to use a whiteboard infront of my interviewer rather than trying to convey my thoughts using a text editor and just my words. So for a word of advice, due to the nature of the current virtual interviews, practice with just the code editor! For the system design question I used a pad of paper which I showed to the interview several times and that was fine.

• Every interview was preceded by 30 mins of LP

• 30 mins of technical

• 1st round: OOP problem
  I had major difficulty understanding what the interviewer was asking me to do for this problem and so I couldn't code a solution in time. This is likely what cost me the interview.

• 2nd round: System design
  Relatively simple system design problem. Didn't have any issues here at all. Experience: Half of *** the System Design Interview, and a few youtube videos.

• 3rd round: Easy-Medium coding problem. This was very easy and was solved just by using a hash table. But I still had difficulty/anxiety coding it infront of the interviewer. Need to practice that. Still managed to finish it just fine and with time to spare.

• 4th round: Hard coding problem. I was very familiar with a variant of this problem, but naturally the interviewer had thrown in some twist to make it very challenging. Since I only had 30 mins, I spent a few mins trying to figure out how to solve the quirk and couldn't, so I asked if I could solve without it and consider it later, which the interviewer accepted. Took me most of the time to solve the basic variant and then with the limited time remaining discussed with the interviewer how to solve the quirk. I never came to a complete solution.

Result: The recruiter called me a few days later to notify my they wouldn't be sending an offer. I'm not very suprised considering I didn't solve the OOP problem at all. I'll bet nothing else mattered after I failed that problem. Sorry I can't be specific on the problems, I signed an NDA.