Status: 4.5 Year Experience
Position: SDE2 at Amazon
Location: Hyderabad, India
Date: 14th October, 2020
So this is my journey from a Service based company to FAANG.
For those who are from India, I am from Tier 3 College and placed in a service based company so if I can crack Amazon so can you just believe in your self.
I knew at my position most of the big names won't even shortlist my resume. So in 2019 I moved to a product base company which was also having a service base division. So my hike was not that much and the work I was doing, was just looking for logs and doing emails. But, the main benefit was I have the brand name.
So, basically the first company was giving me ₹460000 and then the second company was giving me ₹820000. The salary was not that much but that brand name gave me the perfect identity I needed.
Just after joining the second company my Linkedin was bombarded with recruiters messages for multiple positions. But, I never accepted those since I needed some time to prepare for them.
I started giving interviews from February and got so many rejections. But, 2 months ago things started changing and I got around 4 offers from different Indian companies.
Around 1.5 months ago, I thought now is the time to go for the interview for Amazon. So, I checked the messages in Linkedin and told t he recruited that I am interested. After taking the details she gave me the Online assesment round link.
Online Assesment
I was given H**kerrank link and the questions were very easy. I don't remember the first question but it was too easy and the second question was similar to
https://www.ge*ksforge*ks.org/minimum-steps-reach-target-knight/
After the test, recruited contacted me and said that she will arrange virtual interviews.
For the next two weeks, I hear nothing from her then one thursday I got a call from Amazon in which the person said that the next two rounds will be on the same day that is on Monday, and the third round will be on Tuesday.
First Technical
The interviewer was very awesome, I mean he was very professional and very experienced. First he introduced himself and told me that he is going to ask some behavioural question and if I am not able to give him much details then that would be a problem for me.
I am very good in communications and in the first company I worked too hard so I knew that this is going to be easy. I gave him some good scenarios and after 35 minutes we move to a coding question.
I don't remember the question but it was related to maps.
The level of that question was Leetcode medium. I was actually very excited after seeing the question and I solved it without much effort. But, in my excitement I forgot about a major condition. In the end he told me that there is one mistake but I was not able to find it.
Then, he showed me the mistake and told me that no worries you could easily found it in the unit testing.
Second Technical
The second techincal was taken by a SDE and even before the round, I knew that this round is going to be bad.
Why? because experienced persons have more knowledge in judging a person. Like in the previous round, interviewer knew that no one writes perfect code in one go. But, these SDE are not experienced and they actually wants you to write a perfect code.
So, after asking LP question for 20 minutes he gave me a LP hard question. After discussing it for 30 minutes, he told me to write code in 10 minutes and syntax of the code should be perfect. As expected, I wasn't able to and the interview ended.
System Design Round
This interviewer was again a Senior engineer and again I knew this round will be good. He asked me to design Facebook Messenger. I gave him everything from estimation to diagrams and he was impressed.
After 35 minutes, he started asking LP questions and again they were an easy thing for me so I passed.
After a week, I was told that the feedback is positive and there is going to be the next round which will be Bar raiser.
Bar Raiser
This was the most difficult round and it was scheduled for 1 hour but the interviewer extended that to extra 1 hour.
In this round again some LP questions for 20 minutes. After that there was a coding question it was LP medium Dynamic Programming question. After spending around 1 hour I thought this round is over but then he started me asking LLD general questions. Then again there LP questions.
After 1 week, I was told that the feedback is positive and there will be hiring manager round.
Hiring Manager
This was the easiest round. The interviewer only asked me the LP question and they were my strong point. So, this round actually went too good.
After 1 week, I got a call and they told me I was selected and on 14th October I got the offer.
You can check out the compensation details here - https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/899841/Amazon-or-SDE-2-or-Hyderabad
My Story
I was preparing for coding interviews from 6 months. At the time of giving interview at Amazon I had done around 400 questions in which mostly were easy and medium.
For System Design, I used - https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer and Grokking the system design.
If anyone have any question then please post it in the comment and I will be happy to answer that.