YOE : 1.5
Date: May 2020
Status : New grad, MS in CS

I got a chance to interview with AWS, so thought of sharing my experience to this platform which has helped me a lot in my preparation.

Reached out to a recruiter via LinkedIn and completed the online assessment sometime around March 2020.

Online Assessment - 2 questions followed by asking you to explain your approach.

Virtual Onsite 5 rounds

BQ - Behavioral Questions
LP - Leadership Principles

** All coding questions I got can be found from the Top amazon QNS Leetcode premium **

Round 1 ( Hiring Manager) : Full of Leadership principles - the ones they highly focused were Customer obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify. I was satsified with this round as I had enough examples to provide.

Round 2 ( Senior Engineer) : Interviewer started off by asking BQ's aligned to their LP's for about 25 min after which he gave me Amazon FAQ ( Leetcode premium) - Graph problem which can be solved via DFS. I was able to provide a solution within the time and he was satisfied with it.

Follow Up : Asked me to minimize the recursive stack, ( provided me a hint too which I was able to recognize only after the call just ended )

Round 3 ( Senior Engineer ): BQ for around 15 mins, and gave me a problem related to strings ( Amazon FAQ ) - the interviewer was friendly and guided me whenever I made small mistakes in my logic. I was able to arrive at a working solution

Follow Up : asked me a slight variant of the same question - was able to discuss the approach and interviewer was fine but could not implement.

Round 4 ( Senior Engineer ) : BQ for around 25 mins, followed by a Design question ( Amazon FAQ ). I was able to code this but the interviewer seemed to be unconcerned and did not ask any questions while I was writing the logic.

I guess he was satisfied - Follow Up : How will you accomodate the above design in a multithreaded environment.?
Was not able to completely answer this ( more of a discussion, did not ask me to write code)

Round 5 ( Bar Raiser Senior Engineer + Shadow Interviewer ) : I believe this round was the reason I ended up not getting the offer. Started off with BQ aligned to the LP's - the interviewer followed up with every single answer I had provided, and I had to repeat the same examples which I had mentioned in other rounds as I was running out of it.

After 30 mins, was given a System design problem - I was able to discuss the requirements and started off with a high level component design, he was kind of unresponsive at this time and the shadow interviewer was asking me questions about my approach. At the end, was not able to fully provide the solution and literally bombed this round.

The Recruiter reached out after 3 business days with a reject. I feel amazon interviews are highly LP oriented, so would suggest everyone to prepare 2-3 examples with accurate data points for each LP. There are high chances that you may run out of examples in your final round or the one before it. Pay careful attention to the hint that interviewers give you. Best of luck to everyone.!