So I decided to give amazon a shot for fun. I knew what they TYPICALLY want but decided to give it a chance to see if they want engineers or people who memorize leetcode solutions.

Current Role : Software Architect at a fintech startup.
compensation : 39L + ESOPS
YOE -> 6 ( in core payments domain )

Here is the story with amazon hyderabad,

• As usual a recruiter reaches out to you, considering the yoe, they skip the OA.

• Two interviews with roughly 3 years of experience show up as interviewers. Start bragging about the work they do, was mostly jargon, because when they started mentioning genAI solutions, LLM, and i cross questioned them whether they were planning on RAG based or fine tuning, ( it was clear on his face he did not have a clue about what i just said ), as expected i get to hear, it's internal policy I can't disclose.
  Also the guy seemed to have an arrogant tone trying to condescend by showing they work one of FAANG.

• Coming to the interview coding round.
  https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder/
  This was the exact question asked, I had solved it before so i had a fair idea on the approach - they tried to confuse me but I had my answers very clear.

• I devised the answer from scratch in the 25 mins whatever they gave me to code. The code worked exactly fine during the dry run and when i ran it later on my machine to test.

• Seems they wanted someone who had that solution memorized and could code it up in 5 mins.

Also in the end, to show that arrogant prick that there is nothing to be arrogant about, i mentioned we tried out windsurf, cursor, claudecode, amazonQ and even intellij sense, and found amazonQ to be a shitty tool, why would amazon ship something like that? BURN ;p

P.S. I also take interviews so i know what to expect, I have learnt it from the best of senior engineers who have built platforms from scratch and not jumped organizations doing leetcode. But these folks understand nothing but rote leetcode solutions.

I rejected an Amazon offer too once, just FYI:)
So it's not bad to get rejected from amazon interview ( you can get an offer if the interviewer knows how to interview )

Its time for organizations to teach new joinees how to take interviews. This has been my experience with Amazon everytime. The bar of amazon is going low day by day.

I just give amazon interviews for fun.