Hi all, I just finished interviewing for the first time for the SDE 2 role at Amazon and wanted to share some thoughts on the process.

YOE : 2 years
Location : Bay Area
Education : MS in Computer Science
Date of Onsite : 7, 8 th October,2021
Working as a Software Engineer at a non FAANG company.
Problems solved : 700 on LC (Meds : 392 Hard : 75 Easy: 233)

Interview:

OA Round

1. Question was similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/number-of-connected-components-in-an-undirected-graph/, little variation, instead of array of edges, input was a matrix of 0s and 1s where matrix[i][j] = 1 means (i, j) edge is present.
2. https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/1085968/Amazon-OA-or-Optimization-Box-Weights/862764

Recruiter came back to me following week and mentioned that I had advanced to onsite (no phone screen).

I prepared for the onsite for 4 weeks.

Onsite was in the first week of October

1. Coding + LP
   The first interview was a manager with over 7+ years of experience. He briefly introduced himself and immediately told me that before jumping into the leadership principles he wants to check my technical competency and proceeded to ask me a ** LC Hard** problem.
   Problem : https://leetcode.com/problems/integer-to-english-words/
   I was able to solve it iteratively in O(N) time complexity but the interview had some other approach in mind.
   The last 15 minutes were spent talking about the leadership principles and a lot of followups on the projects.
   ** Honestly, I found it weird that the manager didnt even want me to introduce myself and directly jumped onto the coding part**. The interviewer was not satisfied with the my coding approach.

2. System Design + LP( Most weird part) ( Bar Raiser Round)
   Now here starts the weird part, There were two engineers on this interview. One was a principal engineer who was shadowing a lady interviewer.
   The interviewer had a hard time talking in english and proceeded to tell me its the first time she is conducting an interview. It took her 5 minutes to explain the flow of the overall interview(i.e. first LP and then coding or sys des) and proceeded to ask me about leadership principles. I had to communicate my LP answers two or three times to her because she had hard time understanding my vocabulary. I spent 35 minutes talking about the projects I have worked on and my contribution on those projects.

Then she proceeded with a system design question about a weather app. She copy pasted a wrong question on the live code platform, apologized and then posted the correct problem statement. She told me to discuss LLD first, After 5 minutes told me to give a higher level overview. I got confused about whether I should give a HLD or an LLD first. I couldnt complete the sys des question on time at all.

At the end, I reverse interviewed the interviewer about the work on the team and I had a hard time understanding what she said. On the other way round, the shadow interviewer was quite cordial and at the end of the interview I asked him some questions about the challenging projects that he has been working on.

3. Coding + LP ( Two interviewers)
   The interviewers were senior engineers on the team. They both were quite cordial and I had really great time discussing LPs with them.
   The coding question was related to searching correct words. Followups were about coding a Prefix tree, Suffix tree and generate all strings that have a Prefix using Tries. I coded up the question and the followups and we had 5 minutes to spare at the end. Had a good discussion about the culture on the team and the challenging stuff they have been working with. Overall the experience was really good and the interviewers specifically mentioned that I did good on the coding part.

4. Coding + LP
   The interviewer was a senior SDE. The first 25 minutes were spent on discussing LPs, meeting deadlines, what to do if you miss deadlines , handling clients and deep dive about some projects.
   This was followed up by a coding question which was a variation of generate subsets. Solved it using backtracking. He had a couple of followups and was asked to discuss various approaches to solve them. Overall the interviewer was satisfied with my approach.

   Problem : https://leetcode.com/problems/subsets/

** Result :**
I got a phone call from the recruiter stating that Amazon is not moving forward with me and I can reapply for SDE positions after 24 months. I was shocked about getting a cool off for 24 months.
The onsite feedback mentioned that I didnt match the technical competencies as I failed to provide optimal solutions for the coding problems and system design. I told the recruiter about the communication gap between me and the interviewer in the second round and she said that nothing can be done about that.
Overall I didnt have a good experience interviewing with Amazon. I think its not good to have a interviewer who cannot even communicate clearly in the bar raiser round.