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 ?
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