Hi Leetcoders,
I want to share my experience interviewing at Amazon and Google. I won't be able to share the exact questions. I hope my post will help some of you.

YOE: 4.5

Preparation:

• 200 plus medium questions, 35 easy questions, 70 hard questions.
• A few two hour contests on one of the popular platforms.

Amazon:

• Round 1: Online screening. Two adhoc questions, similar to leetcode easy questions.
• Round 2: Virtual Onsite coding round: A popular dp question on strings. Solved it in 10 mins. A second question that builds on top of the first one. Gave it some thought. Solved it in another 10-15 mins. Finished the interview sooner than an hour.
• Round 3: Virtual Onsite coding round: A medium/hard question on binary trees. Solved it with recursion. Took some time to come up with the approach. Interviewer was patient and helpful. Second question was based on sliding window. Solved it using a known approach.
• Round 4: System Design round: I was asked to design a slightly complex system, write the apis, explain how the services would talk to each other. Further optimizations were discussed. Eventually ran out of time and couldn't write the code for the entities. Tip: Practice system design by writing on a piece of paper or going through mock interviews.
• Round 5: Bar Raiser: My feedback so far was great. This round mainly focused on behavioural questions. I was adviced by my recruiter to think of examples from my career that are in line with Amazon's leadership principles. This was really helpful.
• Round 6: Object Oriented Design: Was asked to design something out of a real life example. The interviewer was really smart, asked 3 to 4 followup questions that involved tweaking the current code. He paid special attention to the way I was making changes. Tip: Focus on doing things right before doing them quickly. Speed comes with practice.

Result: Got an offer a few days later for SDE2 at Bangalore.

Google
I wasn't sure I should apply at Google. I was totally under-confident. But eventually gave it a shot. Gave my best to the preparation. These interviews at Google were some of the best interviews I have ever attended or heard about.

• Round 1: Phone Screen. I was expecting an easy problem in the telephonic round. Don't make that mistake. Prep well. Somehow I solved the problem. It was based on binary search trees. After the round, got a very detailed and helpful feedback from the recruiter. Example, Write code faster, run through a few test cases, ask clarifying questions before jumping into conclusions. I took the feedback very positively and worked on these areas. I used to use a timer and every question that I solved after that was timed. I aimed at getting my solution accepted on leetcode in the first try. This greatly improved my problem solving abilities. I had asked the recruiter to schedule the remaining interviews after a month.
• Round 2: Virtual onsite 1. A slightly vague question for the first part. Solved it quickly. Follow up question was a bit difficult. Solved it with a small hint.
• Round 3: A sliding window based question, but trickier. Follow up with a modification on the same question.
• Round 4: A simple array based question. Solved it really quickly. The constraints were changed in the followup, this took me quite some time to think of an optimal approach. Eventually came to the approach but ran out of time to code it. Tip: Always communicate your thoughts, the interviewers help you and prevent you from getting lost. I had a really good discussion on the approach.
• Round 5: Googleyness round. The interviewer was a really nice person and we discussed some events in my career. Tip: Follow what your recruiter tells you to prepare for googleyness rounds
• Round 6: A simple question was asked at first. Solved it. It got modified into something that involved more mathematical analysis than I knew or was confident about. I thought I had bombed this interview. The recruiter while giving me my feedback, said this interview's feedback was a bit iffy. Tip: Even if you're in the middle of an interview and feel like you can't answer the question, give it your best shot. Discuss with the interviewer. Your approach is equally, if not more, important than your code or written solution.

Result: Got submitted for team matching, had a meeting with a manager after a few days, got approved by HC a few days later and got the offer.

Some general tips:

1. While preparing, be in interview mode. What this means is, time your practice sessions similar to your interview duration. This will help you recognize the issues yourself and overcome them.
2. Solve questions with a gradient of difficulty. Don't solve a lot of easy questions. Move on to questions with higher difficulty. IMHO, questions that you cannot solve at first are more helpful than the ones you can easily solve.
3. Get a good night's sleep everyday, stay physically healthy. This helps because a person who's physically healthier is more likely to be able to handle stress during an interview.