Amazon | SDE1 | Germany | Offer
Anonymous User
7832

I was contacted by a recruiter on LinkedIn for SDE2 at AWS Ireland.

Online coding:
https://leetcode.com/problems/merge-intervals/
https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-happy-string/

Phone Screening round:
It was pretty easy, he asked me about internal working of hashmap.
Basic java question regarding multithreading (locks, synchronise, volatile)
Tested my knowledge regarding Generic type in Java.
One easy coding question : Find a pair whose sum is equal to given sum in an unsorted array
One design question: how will you scale a web server without adding more hardware, we had a good discussion regarding the same.
One Leadership question: Tell me about the hardest prob which you have solved in your current company.

In person interview:

Round1: Coding round
Same interviewer who took my phone screening round

Asked me to implement funtionality of hashmap (get and put), then he asked me to make it thread safe.
we discussed the approach together and he was satified
1 DP question which I already solved earlier so I was able to code it without much thought.
Asked me to implement LRU cache, I deliberately overlooked this during practice as I assumed that this question is quite popular and Amazon might not ask it again :P.
I was able to do it after some time.
1 leadership question, tell me about the time when you find it diffiult to debug something.

Round 2: Coding round
Asked me to design a shopping cart using oops concept.
That's it , he did not provide any other details. I kept asking multiple question.
Honestly I thought this question is pretty vague and interviewer was not helpful. I guess he had a fixed solution in his mind and excepting me to read his mind and code. Although I did code it assuming various entities like Product, Order, Cart etc but he was clearly not satified.
Then he asked me to implement discount against each Product, there can be multiple discount coupons.

Lastly one more leadership question, tell me about a time when you push back to your manager/team and stick to your decision.
This was my worst round.

Round 3: Design Round
Interviewer was super cool with long hair, he reminded me of 'gilfoyle' from silicon valley :P
Gave me a design prob:
front end server is accepting 5000 req/sec but backend server has the capacity to handle 3000 req/sec.
We had a good discussion over this problem. Although I proposed a solution but I felt I was under prepared for design related questions and I found it difficult to answer his cross questions.
Then we moved to Leadership question, asked me about some scaling related use case.

Round 4: Bar Raiser (No technical question in this round)
There were so many leadership related questions and I could not recall all of them.
Some which I remember:
Tell me about a time when you received a negative feedbback and how you responded.
Tell me about a time when your manager didnt agree to you but you felt that you were right.
Tell me about a time when you proposed an innovative solution, there were many follow up questions on this.

Finally we had an indepth discussion regarding a use case involving micro services and Grpc.

Round 5: Hiring Manager (No technical question in this round)
Again too many leadership questions.
I was able to give him good stories and he was satisfied.

Overall interview experience was great but I knew I wont be able to make it because of round 2 and 3.
Recruiter responded back after 10 days saying there is one bad and one good news, bad that you are not selected for SDE2 role but we think you are a great match for SDE1.
They did not have any SDE1 opening at Ireland so he said he will get back after a week if there is any opening across Europe.

Finally he responded back saying that there is an opening at AWS Germany and you'll be a good fit.

Comments (15)