Status: Taking BS online
Experience: 1.5 years + 3 years of freelancing.
Position: SDE2, AWS

Recruiter Process:

• Applied to Amazon job on indeed
• Was refered to apply on the website with an email from the recruiter
• Was sent an online assessment, I pushed it back 1 month to prepare myself

Preparing:

• https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/amazon, I did about 20%
• Top amazon leetcode questions, attempted the top 12 but only got 8
• Youtube videos from different people solving problems
  Notes: Your mileage may vary. Do what you need to do to be confident that you can finish the online assessment. If you have the option, Do leetcode mock interviews as they are pretty similar to the online assessment.

Online Assessment:

• First question: Medium leetcode question, one of top 15 amazon questions
  I already faced this a few times, so I was able to solve it nicely and fairly quickly
• Second question: Medium leetcode question, one of the top amazon questions but not in the first 15. You will come across it doing https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/amazon under others.

I got feedback from my recruiters that I did really well on the online assessment. I was lucky to have seen the two problems here.

Recruiter Process pt.II:

• A different recruiter reached out congratulating me on being invited for a virtual interview, they asked me to give them 5 dates that work for me and I chose a date thats more than a month out again to give myself time to prepare.
• A week before, I get my prepcall that tells me what to expect and what to focus on especially regarding the systems design interivew.

Preparing:

• Personal
  • I was getting distracted easily, so I removed all distractions, deleted all social media apps and logged out of accounts on my PC, removed my games. Best decision I made. I was so much more productive and it made preparing so much more entertaining.
  • I made sure I woke up at exactly the same time every day, and had the same routine. I actually started making my bed. I planned my day by asking myself how do i give anon the best day possible today while also attenting to anon's responsibility. We are much better at caring for others than for caring for ourselves, so doing this in third person felt a little crazy but was very helpful. I made myself go on walks and I showered every day
  • I bought melatonin gummies in case my sleep schedule were to try to wrestle itself out of the grip of my new routine.
• Professional:
• Datastructures and Algorithms
  • When solving leetcodes, I wanted to have a working solution by 10-15 minutes and I wanted to have an idea what the optimal solution was by 20. 2 leet codes per hour, spend 10 minutes reading other solutions or looking at other submissions.
  • I primarliy did https://leetcode.com/explore/interview/card/amazon for the first 20 days, and not enough of it.
  • I did practice makes perfect interviews, untill I became comfortable to talk to another person through my thought process of solving a problem. I got some really nice connections their, including an engineering manager at a really good company.
  • I stopped doing practice makes perfect interviews because I hit diminishing returns and some of them actually took 2 hours and there was a lot more I could do with 2 hours at this point and I'm getting closer to running out of time.
  • I started doing leetcode top Amazon questions in the last 10 days, 30 of them, and revisiting my solutions every few days to make sure I knew how to do all of them if I got a similar question
  • All in all I did +40 leetcodes but with 140 working submissions. I think its best to aim for quality over quantity here and understand each problem and how once can relate on problem to another (example: 3sum 2 pointers and trapping rain water 2 pointers)
• Leadership Principles/Behavioral
  • I created a google doc and wrote my whole professional story form a to z. find as many good stories as you can that can be tagged with applicable leadership principales. Put yourself in the shoes of the interviewer and find what would be most appealing to them. Aim for at least 10, you will need them.
  • Take your cherry picked stories and talk them out, write what you say, read it, look at how you can make it better, emphasis on leadership principles aspects and stop using we so much. focus on saying I. details, metrics, and people titles of people are good.
  • Create a pitch in the structure of NSTAR, nugget (which tells the interviewer what to look for. example: Let me tell you about the time I improved the loading times of our website from 2 seconds to less than 0.1), then the classic Sitiuation, Task, Action, Result.
• Systems Design:
  • I bought Grow King the SD interview, but didnt even use it. I used system design primer on github. Much better imo
  • Scaling up a system on AWS from SD primper on github was REALLY good.

Virtual Onsite (5 hours, 1 hour break so 6 total):

• 5-10 minute intro, 15-20 minutes behavioral, 20-25 minutes coding, 5 minutes my questions

  • LP questions were simple enough. Try not to spend all of your good stories on this round
  • Coding was easy problem. Not on leetcode. Array problem. got working solution and talked about optimal solutions based on relationship between the subarrays and output.

• (Bar Raiser)5-10 minute intro, 15-20 minutes behavioral, 20-25 minutes coding, 5 minutes my questions

  • Interviewer drilled hard on questions, asking for details i didnt think about which threw me off my game. Watch out for this, they can be ruthless.
  • Coding was hard problem. Something to do with strings and comparing them. Got working solution, but didnt cover edge case, was able to talk through how I'd fix it (recursion) after hints but didnt have time to implement. Top DP problems.

• 5-10 minute intro, 15-20 minutes behavioral, 20-25 minutes systems design, 5 minutes my questions

  • LP's were a breeze. Interviewer was a great guy and really nice
  • Systems design the interviewer was aiming to find an area that I was comfortable with but I was trying to cover all basis because I was nervous. Problem is probably covered by Grow King but also in System Design primer.
    Feedback from interview: He can tell i was a bit nervous and he said he doesnt expect anyone to be able to operate at amazon scale.

• Break

• 5-10 minute intro, 15-20 minutes behavioral, 20-25 minutes coding, 5 minutes my questions

  • LP's werent too tough but i started repeating myself with same examples. Needed new examples instead.
  • Coding was top 20 amazon questions on leetcode. Had miscommunications that sent me down the wrong path but was able to backtrack and get the desired solution.
  • feedback: interviewer said that my experience was pretty relevant and close to what they look for

• 10 minute intro, 20 minutes about position, 25 minutes behavioral, 5 minutes my questions

  • Hiring manager interview. Smart hard working guy from what it seems.
  • Lps were nice conversations.

This interview was stressful, but the people were very nice and accomadating. Chime was giving me a hard time and I couldn't even see the first three interviewers in the first two rounds but I got it working by the third round.

Please feel free to ask questions.

Update: Got the call that the team won't be going forwards.

Feedback:

• My experience was more front-end heavy
• Systems Design portion was primary concern
• Data Structures and Algorithms need work
• Some concern regarding LP's