Facebook | E4 | Amazon | SDE2 | London | May 2020 | [Offer]
Anonymous User
2470

Status: 6+ YOE
Position: Software Engineer at a startup
Location: London

I am not going to share the exact questions ( due to NDA), so this post is more about my interview preparation and the interview experience.

I have competitive programming background, so algorithms problem preparation were more about practice, going through the code line by line, talking about each line.
I did a lot of mock interviews (20+, facebook, amazon combined) on Leetcode. Leetcode is showing my average interview score is 8.33 ( you can see yours here: https://leetcode.com/interview/overview)

I solved 91 leetcode problem in total. Easy 18, Medium 53, Hard 20. Most of this problem are on Facebook's top 100 list. I didn't solve that much problem from Amazon's list.

Facebook Interview Experience | E4 | London | Offer

I got referral on March, had Phone interview on April, then Onsite Interview on May

Phone Interview:

Problem related to product [ easy-medium] , finding some anagram [ easy-medium ]

Onsite Interview [Virtual]

Coding Interview 1: Word search with wild card ( medium ), K th element ( easy ).
Coding Inteview 2: Verifying some dictionary ( easy), Balancing Parenthesis ( medium ).
System Design: Web crawler with some requirements.
Jedi Interview : More about Conflict management, past experience about leading projects, then some coding question related to income tax.

I would say the coding questions were quite easy for me, I could solve them all having 5-8 mins remaining.

Got verbal offer from London 1.5 weeks later.

Advice to future interviewee

Facebook interviewers want efficient solution coded, so make sure you get to the solution ASAP, also coded correctly. Do a dry run through the code with some inputs, also think about some corner cases, use those cases to convince them that your code works.

Frankly speaking I had work experience of building web crawler before, so just used that experience, talk through various tech stack, solutions and their trade offs. For jedi interview its mostly your experience, I don't think you can learn from some courses to talk about some scenario.

Amazon Interview Experience | SDE 2 | London | Offer

I was referred on May 2020, got online assesment test. After the online assesment test, I went to onsite interview ( virtual).

Online Assesment Test

  1. Easy question about string
  2. Medium question about greed problem. (Problem statement was poorly written).

Onsite [Virtual]

Coding Round 1: Longest sequence with consecutive number and leadership principle questions
Coding Round 2: This one is OOD also I think, as interviewer gave me some problem about maximum number of people in a room in some time range. I had to talk about what information I need as input to solve it, then coded it. Later had leadership principle questions.
Coding Round 3: Leadership principle questions, then some problem related to merging work load, then merging sorted lists.
System Design: Again leadership principle questions, then design instagram.

Got verbal offer one week later.

Advice to future interviewee

Amazon interviews are exhausting as you have to talk a lot due to leadership princinple question. So make sure you have enough water/ liquids to have good amount of energy. Go through Amazon's leadership principles, find some example of your life related to those. But still I think its all about your work experience rather practice.

Preparation Materials

  1. Leetcode premium
  2. Some online courses about system design
  3. Some online course about behavioural interview
  4. Sleep
  5. Mock interview with some random people and on leetcode.

Thats it from me, I am sorry that I am not able to share the exact question, but I hope my interview experience will help you to get prepared.

Good luck to you all.

Comments (3)