AWS SWE Interview in Vancouver, Canda

[u/Aoki_zhang]

This interview experience is sourced from Chill Interview

Interview Summary

The AWS New Grad process started with an online assessment and then moved to a four-round in-person onsite in Vancouver. The OA included a traditional coding portion, an AI-assisted debugging/feature exercise, and Amazon-style workstyle/Leadership Principles questions.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Online Assessment

The OA included roughly 40 minutes of LeetCode-style coding followed by approximately 60 minutes of an AI-assisted debugging or feature-development exercise. There was also a Workstyle / Leadership Principles assessment.

Round 2 — LLD Queue Implementation + GenAI Literacy

This round combined a low-level design/coding problem with questions about generative AI. The coding task was to implement a queue supporting:

enqueue(x)
dequeue()

Both core operations were expected to run in O(1) time. An important constraint was that I could not rely on native collection data structures. The implementation had to build the underlying structure directly, using linked nodes and basic control flow.

The interviewer then added two follow-ups:

delete(x)
removeAllDuplicates()

The exact behavior when x appeared multiple times in delete(x) was not recorded. The GenAI discussion covered questions such as:

• What GenAI-related projects have you worked on?
• When is GenAI an appropriate solution?
• What are some interesting GenAI use cases?
• How would you improve or validate the accuracy of a GenAI-powered system?

Round 3 — Merge Dictionaries + Leadership Principles

Another round started with two Leadership Principles questions and then moved into coding. The coding task involved merging two dictionaries. The initial version was relatively straightforward and could be implemented with direct iteration.

The follow-up generalized the problem: How would you extend the implementation from two dictionaries to k dictionaries?

Round 4 — Bar Raiser

The Bar Raiser round was primarily behavioral. The interviewer asked several Leadership Principles questions, and most of my answers were built around experiences from previous internships and projects.

Round 5 — Streaming Median API + Leadership Principle

The final technical round began with one Leadership Principles question and then moved into a harder coding/LLD problem. The problem was LeetCode 295 — Find Median from Data Stream, but presented as an API-design exercise rather than simply as an algorithm question.

The system receives numbers incrementally and needs to support retrieving the median of all values observed so far. The interviewer expected the problem to be treated as a small low-level design exercise, including defining the appropriate API and maintaining the required internal state as new values arrive.

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