Years of Experience :- 9.5 Years
I was reached out by the recruiter from Amazon for this opportunity. I have been working in Telecom IT industry for last 9.5 Years so had little knowledge about the depth of DSA/Algo. TBH, never used Graph/Trees in my entire career. On top of that I was ECE passout from tier 3 college so you can understand about basic knowledge. Anyways, I had one week of time to prepare for online assesment & I prepared for the same. At the end of week, I had around 20 Leetcode questions under my bucket (15 Easy, 5 Medium)
Nevertheless, I tried my luck & here is the experience which might be helpful for other aspirants:-
1. Online Assesment :- Was given two queries. One was very similiar to partition label(https://leetcode.com/problems/partition-labels/) & another one was similiar to number of Island problem (https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-islands/). In all, 90 minutes were given on some online platform. I have to complete the code and also couple of auxillary questions about time & space complexity.
I tried my best & was able to solve both the questions. I remember i click on submit answer when timer was showing 11 seconds remaining. I literally went from blank to writing the code in that 90 mins war like situation. Every second i felt i will be rejected but i made the thinking quite aligned and was able to solve both the queries. Got email from recruiter saying I am good to go for onsite rounds.
Recruiter called me & asked me if we should go for onsite rounds in 3 days from today. But during the conversation he realised that I am not actively looking for job & may be not at my best to go for onsite rounds & asked me if you can prepare for onsite in next 3 weeks. I see this as a window of opportunity. Maybe there is achance. Who knows :)
In this 3 weeks, I prepared myself. Leetcode count was 98 problems (70 Easy, 25 Medium, 3 hard)
2. Onsite Round 1 Technical - 1 hour
Interview started with basic introduction & then moved to LP . Since I have good amount of experience in IT and did well in learning the latest tech. So I had multiple examples for all the LP queries.
Then recruiter went into technical skills & i fumbled like anything. Since my coding skills were quite rusty for that particular DS. Though I was able to explain the approach and the time/space complexity of my thought process. At the end, the code which I wrote was not completed due to time limt. And the 1st online round was over. * I felt shattered but i need to get back as next technical round was in next 30 mins. Questions were mostly medium/hard from Leetcode. One of the sample appeared to be like this https://leetcode.com/problems/reverse-nodes-in-k-group/*
3. Onsite Round 2 Technical - 1 hour
Same process of introduction & LP queries. And I explained my points very well. Recruiter was acknowledging all my points & I had good 9 years of product development so I had examples for all the LP princicple.
Technical portion of interview had 2 technical questions related to arrays. Both of them are from leetcode medium & easy problem respectively. I nailed them with 100% clean code. Since array was one of my strongest forte & I would i was lucky here :).
Interviewer asked me multiple dry runs and it went through all those dry runs perfectly fine. He was happy & i could sense in his tone as well
The interview closed on an awesome note where I was super happy that I solved everything. Problems were from LC and appeared something like with variation https://leetcode.com/problems/find-peak-element/ & https://leetcode.com/problems/maximum-subarray/
4. Onsite Round 3 System Desing/Manager - 1 hour
In this round, I was asked about system design of my projects & I draw the diagram on their online platform. There were many counter questions & I was able to answer all of them. Like i mentioned, i had good 9 years of product development & I was fortunate enough to work on all the new tech. So, I was able to explain in detail about processing of multiple microservices which I owned. And since I am AWS certified , I was able to answer all the question about which services of AWS I was using and why. Since I have done good research in my current role. I knew that this is my playground.
Needless to say i nailed this round as well. The round was over before the time. Manager was super happy & he wished me luck for all the rounds. Questions were mostly from my project. The interviewer asked me the whole process from designing to the deployment and monitoring the system in production. I explained every bit with full confidence as it is my day-in day-out activity. He was very impressed as he admitted that he also faced the similiar problem in past and used the same thought process & tools to fix it.
Now, I was standing in a position with super awesome system design round & 1 great tech round & 1 not so great tech round. To be honest, I would say i should have been rejected based on first onsite tech round only.
And out of the blue moon, I was called for Bar Raiser. :) I just couldn't believe that I was able to make this far. I was given 1 week time for bar raiser due to some logistics issue.
I used this one week to get hold of my weak areas. I spent time on Leetcode.*** Count on leetcode stands 145 (77 Easy, 44 Medium, 4 Hard)***
5. Onsite Round 4 Bar Raiser - 1 Hour
It started with the introduction and then delved into LP. Like in all previous round, I nailed all the queries because of my strong hold of work/process/leadership quality.
It was followed by a technical section. I was given a problem to code and I fumbled. I was trying to solve it but correct solution was not coming. Before the interviewer could say anything, I found the bug and it worked just fine. I did all the 3 dry runs which was given in the example. Fixed couple of bugs & recruiter said "This looks good". I even told the T/S complexity of the code as well. Since this was bar raiser so the interviewer kept on taking notes as i was explaining my solution or answering to the LP questions. The good thing which I must admit is I was not nervous at all. Maybe after reaching to this round, I was able to give my natural answers and we had a healthy discussion and it felt like I am explaining the stuff to my product owner and he/she is asking follow up question and I have giving the reasoning/rationale behind my approach. Overall I enjoyed this round as well.
Now, I have to wait for the recruiter to get the feedback. I am not sure if it would be offer or no-offer. But all i know is I tried my best. I utilised the time of night for last 1.5 months and I know i would have bombed if i was interviewed 1 month before. The recruiter was very generous to give me opportunity of preparing for the round.
I will update this post based on whatever may come. At the end of the way, we are humans and I might have missed anything which may against my candidature or may be not. So fingers crossed.
#WhateverMayCome!
PS: So recruiter came back & said we will go ahead with one more design round. I was given couple of more days to prepare for this round. I did well in this round. I was asked about detailed design of my project which I explained in detail. I was asked to explain how ECS in AWS works in detail which I did seamlessly.
And after almost 1 week I was informed that I have been selected for SDE-II role and expect a offer letter soon. So guys finally I made it through. I will put the compesation details once i receive it .
Thank you so much guys for your warm wishes and luck messages. Never give up & work towards making it at the end.