Status: 3 years of experience, never interviewed with FAANG before.

1. Online assessment

I applied online and received a link for online assessment the next day. I was quite surprised that it took so little time for Amazon to respond. Solved everything and passed all test cases.

2. Phone screen

I had around 20 mins of behavioral questions, 10 mins of theoretical CS questions (around hashmaps, stacks, queues, and time complexities), 20 mins for a basic coding question (you can easily find it in the list of popular questions) and 5 mins for reverse interview. The experience was very positive. Received the onsite invitation in two days.

3. Virtual onsite

Round 1: LPs.

Round 2: LPs + coding. The coding question was a combination of an LC easy and LC medium and required a lot of code, I was able to solve it on time although I had to use some helper functions to abstract away some details. The interviewer was fine with it and wanted me to spend the remaining time analyzing the code and testing it.

Round 3: LPs + coding. The coding question was LC medium and I was able to provide three different ways to solve it and discuss the complexities and various use cases of the approaches. However, right after the interview, I realized that one of my solutions had a minor bug.

Round 4: LPs + system design (bar raiser). Probably my weakest round, since I have a non-CS background and my IT working experience was quite different from the full-stack software engineering. I cannot share the exact question, but it was centered around the core service of the team I was interviewing for. So, in case you have a system design interview coming up, try to learn as much as possible about the team and the work they are doing, and think about how you would design something similar.

Round 5: LPs + OOD. The parking lot question, which probably went well.

4. Preparation

• A lot of mock interviews on P-R-A-M-P, even made some friends there with whom we continued to practice together later.
• Solved around 350 problems (approximately 100/200/50 for easy/medium/hard) over three months (April - June).
• Read half of 'Designing data-intensive applications', the book is a gem. It spiked my interest in system design and I am planning to study it extensively.
• Watched videos about behavioral interviews on Youtube and prepared some personal anecdotes aligned with Amazon LPs. This acticle was also extremely helpful to understand what exactly is meant by those principles.

5. Thoughts

I have mixed feelings about the overall interview process.

On the one hand:

• I enjoyed interacting with the interviewers, almost all of them were professional and very nice.
• I enjoyed solving technical problems and I think that my overall technical performance was decent, but probably my background and current skills were not a perfect fit for that particular position.

On the other hand:

• The LP component is emphasized way too much. I had to talk about myself for around 2-3 hours out of a total of 5 hours. It is very hard to come up with a fresh well-thought personal anecdote every time a new interviewer asks you some variation of 'tell me about a conflict you had at work'. For me, that part felt very robotic like interviewers were just trying to check some boxes instead of attempting to perform a holistic evaluation.
• The communication with my recruiter was quite dry. After the phone screen, they just scheduled my onsite in a week without asking me about convenient dates or giving me some time to prepare. I had to decline and reschedule because of conflicting arrangements. I received the preparation materials for the onsite just 4 days before the actual onsite. I probably wouldn't pay a lot of attention to this aspect if it wasn't in contrast with my parallel interview process with Facebook, where it feels like the recruiters genuinely want you to succeed.