Current Status

• Status: 6 YOE, local university
• Position: Senior Frontend Engineer working remotely for company in US
• Location: San Pedro Sula, Honduras
• Date: August 27, 2020

I was scouted for an SDE II role but was offered a role on FDE II.

Online Assessment

90 minutes to solve to two algorithm problems. Both of the problems were posted here:
https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/344650/Amazon-Online-Assessment-Questions

Problems are not exactly the same but have a practical explanation for specific Amazon problems needed to be solved. I would also recommend the Explore > Amazon problems which are very accurate to what is expected throughout the whole technical interview process.

Phone Interview

This was an interview through Amazon Chime with an engineer in Seattle. It involved two LP behavioral questions.

Tip: Do not provide canned responses. You can find plenty of info online regarding the type of questions being asked. My preparation was having my wife ask me around 50 questions and providing responses for them in STAR fashion. I don't remember the specific questions but when you start practicing (speaking out loud and writing the responses to assess them later) you will start to improve in your communication skills.

Tip: Try to practice with someone who would be brutally honest and practice to answer providing different experiences.

The technical coding problem was to right a method to validate if a current position for Go game a given piece(s) has been captured. I had no several exposure to Go before this problem but it was a DFS (backtracking) problem.

Tip: Remember to not only solve the problem but walk the interviewer through your thinking process
Similar:

https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-islands/

Virtual Onsite

It is a 4hr interviews back-to-back held through Chime. The strucuture of each interview is the same. Behavioral questions + Technical problem

• Senior SDE, two behavioral questions. Each behavioral question also has follow-up questions so prepare to answer deep questions about your experience. This is equally important being technically competent. The technical question was implementing some basic data structures ADT from an OOP standpoint.
• Senior SDE, again two LP questions and a coding problem (divide and conquer type). It was an easy question and the interviewer help me get on track. Try to be humble, approachable and that will help you in having the interviewer on your side.
• Tech Lead, I guess this was the bar raiser and was my favorite. The coding problem was a string search problem in a grid. Typical DFS problem and a follow-up problem was solving the problem using a Trie. I was able to solve both of them. We ended up talking about non-related tech problems (again be nice!)
• Engineering Manager, design system problem. Design an online video-game scoring service. This was an ingestion service that required providing a design using messaging, pub-sub, consistent hashing, high-availability and async workers. As I've worked as an architect this wasn't a hard problem and provided a good design for the system. Behavioral questions were harder.
  Result: I passed the onsite (all 4 interviewers) but due that my leadership roles in the past year have been on the frontend so they recommended me to other position.

Frontend Interview

Interview with a tech lead in Seattle for the team which consisted on an LP question and frontend problem. The problem was to design an SPA for a Google-drive like platform. As the team used react I had to walk (coding) the design in the following manner(30 mins):

• Authentication + Security: OAuth, Cookiers, Encryption.
• State Management (I chose Redux)
• API Design + Async call management (non-trivial saga-like behaviors)
• Component Design (React components + CSS resolution of specific grid-like design)
• Monitoring and Performance

What sets apart the interview where the design questions through each part of the SPA. If you have experience building high-performant frontend you are good to go.

Next day, I received an offer that I was recommend by the interviewer (strongly hire).

Preparation

Technical: I am a premium user in leetcode. I would recommend it as it fast-tracks your preparation for the company you are interviewing from. I've solved around 160 questions. Not only I solved the problems on Leetcode but also I solved them on paper. This was the most important step, start with being able to express the problem in terms of input, output and data structure to use, the technique and if you can in mathematical terms (discrete math).
Behavioral: I added some tips above. Practice several questions I got from blogs and Glassdoor. Have a partner to ask this questions to you and give you honest feedback and prepare for follow-up questions.
Remember be nice and humble. Nobody likes to work with an arrogant co-worker or someone that doesn't want to learn from others.