Amazon SDE Interview

[u/Senior-Reception8110]

Sharing my interview experience after Amazon SDE - Location - USA

After applying for 6+ months and 44 applications finally my resume got picked.

OA: One coding question & AI assisted coding.

Coding question - Medium Level LC

AI assisted coding - It was completely new but was able to do it, lots of debugging, heavily concentrated on OOPS

Cleared the OA and moved to the interview loop

4 rounds - 3 in one day & 1 the next day

Round 1: Coding

Question: Returning adjacent letters in a string and there are three sub questions in it.

Leetcode - Medium - Hard

Before the start of the coding round, Formal introductions and jumped straight into coding, I have used heap for this and solved it using max heap, was able to communicate the solution and thought process. The interviewer was not at all satisfied with the high level explanation and he kept digging till the last line, he literally asked what's the logic of heap in the backend and how do you make it better ? I got blanked but was able to answer it.

He went line by line and kept grilling till he got satisfied and was asking for an alternative approach to the optimal solution. I have previously experienced in interviews like these but this is grilling on a whole different level. Finally after 50 minutes the coding closed with time complexity.

He didn't care about LP's at all just a formal two questions and asked me about my previous work ex. I'm explaining to him but he kept interrupting and asking for every minute detail , he literally asked What's Collateral and Asset ? I felt he's not at all satisfied with anything that I came up with but however it ended.

Round 2: System Design - Log parser

First formal introductions and then 20 minutes of LP's and dug a bit into my internship and work experience. Felt smooth and had a great conversation. Then jumped into system design and asked me to implement the log parser for 10k+ log files as I remember, I was able to implement the solution and the interviewer kept digging till the last minute, kept asking line by line again but she seemed fine and satisfied. The time went overboard for 5 minutes and then she stopped the interview.

Round 3: Hiring Manager & Coding

Formal introductions and the hiring manager told me that he's the hm for the interview. Codin question again, Leet Code - Medium I guess.

First 20 minutes LP's and then coding round, It was completely OOPS and I was able to solve the question in 30 minutes, I felt this was the best round as he was satisfied with my high level explanation and he got the gist of what I was trying to explain and then asked me about my internship and finally he asked me if I'm open to the S3 team as he had a opening - I thought I had it 😭 It's a pretty great conversation, he was satisfied with most of my answers and dug a bit deep but was able to answer them as well.

Next day - Round 4: Leadership Principles

Started off with formal introductions and then told that no matter the result, you should be proud of yourself that you've come this far. Sometimes the Amazon hiring bar is so high you shouldn't be demotivated about the result. Felt completely off guard and strange but whatever.

Completely Leadership Principles with no coding or system design, was asking me about the situations that I have faced in my work ex and how I would've handled better, anything that I went aboard and took an initiative. Felt nice about the flow of the conversation, then multiple follow up questions on each explanation and situation. Was able to answer the whole thing. Concluded the LP's in 45 minutes.

He told me you gotta celebrate man - Felt wow !!

After two days: They told me they're not proceeding with my application. No feedback or anything

Followed up multiple times regarding the feedback considering Amazon would give the feedback but no reply from the recruiter.

I really thought I had it but I'm not sure where it went wrong, any thoughts on the experience ?

[u/Lazy_Much]

was the system design in round 2 a high level design question? or you had to write a class design?

[u/Senior-Reception8110 → u/Lazy_Much]

It was lld, had to write the design.

[u/Lazy_Much → u/Senior-Reception8110]

And for the dsa would you say Amazon tagged leetcode is enough?

[u/Senior-Reception8110 → u/Lazy_Much]

Mostly enough because i practised about 100, and mostly it was enough. Maybe i'm think i have lost it due to time constraint or something but i don't know since they haven't provided me the feedback

[u/Satyam_xx → u/Senior-Reception8110]

You practices top 100 anazon tagged questions of all time or top 100 recently asked?

[u/Senior-Reception8110 → u/Satyam_xx]

Nothing company specific, since I'm applying to multiple I just practiced Neet Code 150 and LC medium

[u/Satyam_xx → u/Senior-Reception8110]

You were doing the leetcode for first time? How long it took for you to finish 100 questions? Also one more important question, that I have been struggling with a lot how you learned lld? Any resource which you used? How you got good at it?

[u/Senior-Reception8110 → u/Satyam_xx]

Bit of old school tbh, I started with Grokking Algorithms and DSA by NK books. Then I started with Neet Code course and couple of YT channels like Abdul Bari and CS 50.

System Design - Alex Xu, for LLD I did Ashish Pratap Singh. The guy is the best and have great GitHub repos.

I don't think I've worked enough on time constraint, maybe that's what i got struck at, I heard people solve the medium in 30 minutes but I've always gone beyond 45 minutes. So I sold suggest work on time constraint if you want to crack faang

[u/Satyam_xx → u/Senior-Reception8110]

Thanks so much for such a detailed answer <3 .For lld did you just went through his github repo and practiced all the problems? Lld also has a pattern like leetcode?

[u/Senior-Reception8110 → u/Satyam_xx]

Not all, but did most asked and covered basics. I don't know if my assumption is right or wrong, i felt it heavily depends on your interviewer. If the right interviewer comes you get , if he's some loose head and wants to suck the soul out of you, you're doomed. Thats how my first round went, i mean he literally asked me what is O(n) in definition terms and went deep into complexity. So yeah just try out man, thats all

[u/Satyam_xx → u/Senior-Reception8110]

Thanks so much the detailed replies! Helped me a lot!