Status: 12+ years, Principal engineer
Position: SDE2 at Amazon(was trying for sde 3)
Online assesment
2 questions in 75 minutes. Dont remember them unfortunately. One was a disjoint set question.
Technical phone screen (1 hour):
- Valid sudoku https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-sudoku
Onsite
- 30 Mins behavioral, Why amazon? https://leetcode.com/problems/word-break answered this well but stumbled in behaviral. They ask you every detail of the project i mentioned. What kind of fix? why did you take that route? How many options did you have? Why did you take that task? What was the outcome? How many people worked on it? What was your role? what did you mean by 'implmenet efficiently'? How did the architects react to your suggestion? What kind of appreciation did you receive? were the users happy? How did you know about user appreciation? Onion peeling.
- 38ish mins behavioral with manager, i gave an answer for a question and he said that it might be wrong with my approach and he did not see how my answer fits the question asked even after explaining and asked me to give a different answer. Spent a lot of time behavioral, probably this one is a major screwup in behavioral. System design: indexing and ranking type of question. I Asked a lot of functional details of the problem. It was Easy, gave solution with 2 mins remaining. As per my friend who works in Amazon, they just look to see if you know high level of sytem design, just keep talking and driving the interview. The interviewer seemed to be satisfied. Someone was shadowing him, he did not talk.
- 30 mins behavioral. https://leetcode.com/problems/integer-to-roman Explained the approach that is in the solution tab using hash map. But he did not want to use hashmap or storing the values. Almost solved with hints, he was happy with the solution. Looks like they want to throw curveballs and see how you react. Be prepared for followup questions or changes to the questions.
- 30 mins behavioral. Tree based question, org hieararchy, you need to find out which employee has the higher average salary including his subordinates, you need to create the DS for the tree. Follow up question, how do you improve the performance when there are a lot of updates and a lot of requests with 5 minutes remaining. I suggested segmented tree, heaps, but, not sure. He hinted array, not sure what kind of array. I was almost exhasted.
Got reply on 4th business day saying that I was not selected. Since they don't give feedback, the recruiter hinted that i did well in the system design and the coding. May be he was hinting that my behavioral was bad.
Helpful tips: You will talk a looooooot. Keep bottle of water near you. I was exhausted by the end of 4th interview, was not able to focus on the followup question at all. The interview questions were not so difficult over all the interview questions were easier compared to other FAANG companies i attended, you just need a bit of luck.
I've been preparing for these interviews for about 11 months, still not having luck. You need to be well rounded in sys design, algo, ooad and behavioral. I'm still going to try, just need to take a break and re-connect.
Solved 379
57 hard
197 medium
125 easy