Status: New Grad, MA Math Finance, BA CS
Position: SDE 1 at Amazon
Location: Seattle, Washington, USA
Date: November 1st, 2019
I’ll skip the online assesments but there’s a very detailed post about it, my experience is very similar to it. Didn’t give me any trouble. Mainly leetcode easy problems.
Final Interviews (3 rounds)
Round 1:
Interviewer had a thick accent so I couldn’t understand what he was saying half the time. Nice guy though.
One LP question:
Tell me about one of your projects?
We really went into details for this one took 15 miuntes off the clock.
Coding question: https://leetcode.com/problems/unique-binary-search-trees/
Tip for DP questions: write out the recursive relationship so the interviewer could correct you
F(n)= Sum(F(k)xF(n-1-k) for k in range(0,n-1)) something like that. I finished this question in about 10 minutes since I got the recursive relationship pretty quickly and he made me write out all the solutions for n=4 on a notepad probably because he needed to fill time.
Round 2:
This guy was a little more stern than the first guy and I couldn’t get a read on him.
LP question:
Tell me about one of your projects so the same as the first guy.
He asked me about some OOP defintions such as what is the difference between encapsaltion and inheritance. I didn’t do too hot on this one. When he tried to explain the answer it sounded exactly my answer but I didn’t bother to tell him that. Since there was only 25 minutes left and he wanted to leave 5 minutes for questions he gave me a easy question.
Coding question.
https://leetcode.com/problems/same-tree/ Asked him if he wanted a recursive or iterative solution. and he told me to use the recursive one.
Then he started asking me for some test cases. As I was writing them out laboriously on notepad, he asked me a second question with only 10 minutes left and if I could use my solution for the first one to help.
https://leetcode.com/problems/subtree-of-another-tree/.
Didn’t quite finish it since he wanted a variation where test case 2 would be valid and he cut me off to give time for him to answer some of my questions. He probbaly knew that I could finish given enough time but it was still annoying that he didn’t leave me enough time.
Round 3
Third guy was super nice. I joked that he was the only one who turned on his video function which he seemed to like.
Lp question:
Tell me a time you took some on some risk.
Coding question:
OOP design question. Design a filtering system that can filter books by author or by category. I was all over the place but the guy was nice enough to guide me through everything.
I received the offer within a week (5 business days). I went on the portal early and it said my application is no longer under consideration but received an email saying I got the offer. I think sometimes when recruiters move the status of the application, the system does not respond correctly.