Hi,

Some time ago I've completed my final round with Amazon and I wanted to share my experience.

They reached out to me on Linkedin and within a week I had a phone screening.
The screening problem was something along the lines: Having a word/sentence return all possible words/sentences that can be created by rearranging the letters. So like an anagram generator but sometimes the word provided can be splitted with any amount of spaces to create a full sentence.
After that two behavioral questions.
The same evening I received an email that I got to the final stage..

I went through the preparation call etc but after few days I told them that I received another offer and I will not go through with the final round. Unfortunatelly my new company turned out to be a terrible place to work and I drop an email to my original recruiter asking if I can be reconsidered. They told me that the result of the phone screening is valid for half a year and I can go straight into final stage. We scheduled that within next 7-8 days so I didn't have much time to prepare this time - my bad, I could've asked them to schedule it a bit later but I really wanted to quit current job so...

The final round questions were very easy, compared to some other experiences I've seen here. Each round was first half an hour on behavioral, 25 min coding, 5 min for my questions.

1. find the longest substring with max two distinct characters - my first solution was a bit faster than two pointer, but the interviewer couldn't understand it fully so he asked me to implement it as a two pointer which I did and all seemed good to him. I don't know from which site did he get the question but he took my first solution and pasted it to see if it passes the test cases. I didn't know they are going to do that so it was quite surprising. But it did pass, and second solution passed as well, so all good
2. Process array of events with stock prices for a given day, find top 5 gainers of the day. After that was done I was asked how would I implement a functionality to show a weekly change of given stock. The idea and coding didn't take long so we finished 5 min before time.
3. System design - design Netflix. I failed badly at this one. Because I didn't have that much time to prepare and my decision to get back to them was quite sudden I managed to go through only a couple of examples of system designs and I knew I'll struggle here
4. Processing events, you have 4 types of events, taxi ride start, taxi ride end, taxi called, and something else. you have a taxi rides and each ride has an ID and start time and end time, but the events are provided in random order and you have to publish some metrics, ie. how long was each ride. After that's done, another requirement for new metric - which taxi did the most rides or was called and didn't ride.

After few days I got a call that I got an offer, but because my system design wasn't great they offered me SDE I instead of II. I kind of expected that and I think it's fair, I nailed other interviews so they still wanted me but the recruiter said that compared to other companies like Google or Facebook they really want their SDE II to be really good at system designs because it's essential for your work. I will see about that soon!

Good luck to everyone!