Hey guys, not sure if this will be beneficial, but I wanted to provide some background about my experience interviewing for an SDE II role at Amazon.
If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Apologies that I'm not able to go into too much depth, but I will try my best.
Background
Had a recruiter reach out. Completed the OA about a week after recieving it, recruiter told me I had passed maybe 5 days after that. I took some time off to complete a few other loops and scheduled my Amazon final loop approximately 3-4 weeks after I heard back from my recruiter.
Interview Breakdown
The final round consists of 4 interviews. Each interview is half technical and half behavioral-
DSA:
Testing knowledge on Data Structures and Algorithms. The goal is to solve with the simplest but most efficient data structure possible. Be comfortable explaining your solution, including time and space complexities.
Low-Level Design:
Testing knowledge of Object-Oriented Programming. They are looking for production-level code (ish), with an initial general question and multiple follow-ups. You want your solution to be extensible.
Problem Solving:
How can you solve ambiguous coding questions? They ask one generic and ambiguous DSA-style coding question, but they are looking for you to ask follow-up questions to clarify the requirements. From there, they may ask a few more follow-up questions. Be ready to talk about tradeoffs in approaches and time/space complexities.
System Design:
Are you able to design a scalable solution? They are looking for you to:
- Gather functional/non-functional requirements
- Create high-level design diagrams, including but not limited to system architecture and API design.
- DB Selection, talk about tradeoffs
- Deep Dive when asked
- Scalability
- Bottlenecks and challenges
- Observability
LPs:
Super straight forward behavioral questions. STAR format always, I also include lessons learned when they aren't obvious. Have around 2 stories ready for any given LP, but I've found that if you have a bank of about 10-15 stories, you can pretty much just figured out which stories apply where on the spot. Be sure to practice these once or twice beforehand, though, since they do make up about half the data points interviewers collect on you.
My Interview Experience
DSA:
I was asked a leetcode medium. It was relatively straight forward, a graph-traversal DFS question. There were 1 or 2 follow ups, but they were theoretical. Asked about time and space complexities.
Low-Level Design:
Was asked a relatively common LLD question. It revolved around creating one class to store details about a product, and related product classes specific to those each of those products. Was then asked to give an example code on how to calculate the total price of an entire order of a set of products.
Problem Solving:
Was asked a DSA-style question that was not on LeetCode. It required me to implement a special version of a common data structure. It was relatively straight forward, and I was asked follow-up questions about complexities and tradeoffs.
System Design:
I was asked to design a specific widget for a large e-commerce platform (guess which one). Spent 5 minutes clarifying expectations and requirements, spent about 15-20 minutes on high-level system architecture and api design, and then I spent the remaining time on deep-diving into each component. I made sure that I explained each of my architectural design decisions briefly, and answered any follow up questions I recieved.
LPs:
Very straightforward behavioral questions, I don't remember the exact questions I was asked, but they were simple to answer. Had about 2 stories ready for each LP. I found that if you responded to the question to their liking, the interview wouldn't ask any unrelated additional questions about that LP. However, if your story was missing a key data point they were looking for, they would, after their follow-up questions, ask another question for the same LP. The intuition here is that they are looking to get that data point on you, so if you notice this happens, be sure to be observant and make sure your story aligns with that LP well.
Results
I ended up recieving my offer 2 days after I finished my loop. Recruiter reached out to me and scheduled sell calls with specific teams in my current city, as the team I had recruited for was based in a different city. Ended up matching with one of the teams I had a sell call with.
There are a ton of other posts here with resources for interviews, so I will defer to them for those, but if you do have any specific questions about prep, the interview process, sell calls, or anything in between I'll try to answer them! Good luck to those of you applying!