Current:
Status: MS CS
Experience: ~3 years
Company: Product based company (outside the US), 2 internships during Bachelors and 1 during Masters
Sharing an overview rather than exact questions due to NDA.
SDE2 at Amazon, Seattle, Sep 2020
Been a while since my interview. Hence I couldn't expand much on the details.
Online assessment:
It was done through hacker rank. I don't remember the exact questions, but they were standard LC medium.
Virtual Onsite:
Round 1:
It was a topological sort based question. The question was similar to course scheduling. I suggested 3 approaches and said I would continue with the 3rd approach. The interviewer insisted that I rather code the 1st and 2nd approaches due to which I fumbled a bit. I finished it just in time, with minor errors in time complexities.
Round 2:
This was the system design round. It was a standard question from grok****. Interviewer was really friendly and our discussion went well. There were a couple of follow-ups on database choice, cache eviction policies, etc. which I was able to answer.
Round 3:
I remember being grilled in the LPs. The coding question was a variant of identifying top K from a list. I answered it just in time and have written the time complexities. I didn't have much time for doing a dry run on the test cases and explaining the complexity in detail.
Round 4:
Another standard question from Leetcode. It was a variation of Game of Life. You are expected to code it in a modular fashion. There were follow-ups on how the code would change based on additional requirement changes and I was able to answer them. As it was the last round and I was already exhausted, the interviewer was kind and asked me to take a small break.
Every round had LPs for the first ~25 mins and each round was scheduled for 1 hour.
Leadership related questions (not in order the order they were asked):
- Tell me about a time when you faced a stringent timeline
Follow up - how you could have avoided - Tell me when you had a conflict with your teammates
Follow up - how did you convince them to follow your approach - Tell me about a time when you stepped up and took up some task on your own
Follow up - What made you think you can do it - Tell me about a time when you didn't have time to think about alternate solutions. What did you do and how could you have avoided the situation.
- Tell me about an instance when you saw teammates facing problems and helped them.
- Tell me about a time when received negative feedback.
Follow up- how did you respond, when did you receive this, how did you improve after that, what could you have done so that -ve feedback is not there - Most challenging time at the office
Follow up - why was it challenging - Tell me about a new feature that you developed
- Tell me about a time when you developed something even before a customer asked for it
Recruiter was really helpful and the entire process was seamless. I was surprised at how fast the amazon recruitment process would work. It took less than a week from the initial hackerrank assessment to receiving the final offer letter.
L4 at Google, Mountain View, Sep - Nov 2020
Recruiter reached out to me last year. I told her I would be graduating in 2020 and she was kind to follow up with me on the status, every couple of months.
Phone Screen:
The question was similar to balancing parentheses. There was a follow-up that involved backtracking. Overall feedback was positive and the interviewer was really helpful and friendly. I had a nice conversation with him.
Result: Got feedback on the same day that they would like to move forward to the onsite. Recruiter told me that team matching would start in November-December due to limited headcounts and asked me to take a couple of months of prep time if needed. As it was pointless interviewing too early, I scheduled it for the first week of November.
Onsite:
There were 4 technical rounds followed and 1 googlyness round.
Round 1:
There were 2 interviewers. One was shadowing and I was asked to share my screen as the other interviewer couldn't access the common codeshare. There were 2 questions.
The first one is a standard LC Easy question on Trees.
The second question is unrelated to the first one. It was related to the sliding window in arrays. I haven't seen it before. I would rate it LC medium-hard. I could come up with an optimal approach in the last 5-10 minutes. The interviewer was really helpful in dropping some hints when I was stuck. I think my overall rating would be 5/5 in this round.
Round 2:
This round started with a discussion on my resume (I was not expecting this). I explained about an ML project that I worked on 3 years before. I was asked a few technical details and I could answer them properly as I don't remember those minor details right now as I haven't worked on ML related projects after that one. The coding question was an open-ended question and it is related to log parsing. I spent a significant amount of time gathering the requirements and getting rid of the ambiguity in the problem statement. It involved lots of code and a few abstractions that were resolved once I started coding. I could finish coding most of the components but had little time left for explaining the complexity.
I wish this round could have gone better and I feel there was an even better approach to the coding problem (involving binary search). My assessment would be (3.5-4/5) for this round.
Round 3:
This is a googlyness round. I guess this round was more like a culture fit round testing your communication and how well you respond to a situation at work. There were a couple of standard questions that the interviewer asked. This round wouldn't need any additional preparation if you have already prepared for Amazon's LP. The interviewer was very friendly and we had an engaging conversation as most of my experiences harmonized with his work. I would rate it 5/5.
Round 4:
It was again a variant of the top K question. I was able to answer it and dry run the code on all the corner cases. The interviewer was friendly and there were a couple of follow-up discussions on how complexities would change with changing input sizes. It was a perfect round. I would rate it 5/5.
Round 5:
It was the final round and I was asked question on matrices with a follow-up on the same. I could come up with the solution for the follow-up in the last 5 minutes. Interviewer was kind enough to give an additional 5-minute buffer for me to finish coding. I looked it up after the interview and a similar question was there on LC (medium). I was happy to see my approach was optimal :). It involved DFS. Interviewer was friendly and dropped me hints in the last 5 minutes when I was swaying away towards the sub-optimal approach. I would rate this round as 4.5/5.
Be sure to articulate your thoughts throughout the interview process and ask clarifying questions before making any assumptions. For an L4 interview, I guess you are supposed to come up with your own comprehensive suite of test cases without much help from the interviewer.
I got feedback within a week about HC approval and was fortunate to get 5 team match calls within 3 days. I selected one among them.
Recruiter was really helpful in the entire process and was following up regularly with me/ HMs for team matches.