Status : New Grad, MS CS - NYU
Position: SDE1 at Amazon
Location: New York
Date: April 26, 2019
My entire process for amazon was online. There were 3 rounds of interviews:
- Debugging and analytical questions
- Behavioral an coding problems
- 3 rounds of virtual interview
Debugging and analytical questions
In this round first I was asked to solve some debugging questions. Aim of the exercise was to find the errors in the given piece of code. The errors were both syntactical as well as logical. There was no time limit to solve each question rather there was an overall time for all the questions.
Following this exercise there were a bunch of analytical, sequence based questions.
E.g. 1,3,6,10,- find the next number in a sequence. (Not this easy but on the same lines).
Behavioral and coding problems
This round was divided in two parts. First part was a series of behavioral questions. Several situations were presented in the form of email, text message or in person meeting and after each situation a question was asked. Most of the time you had to give the best response to an email, how would you react to a situation in a meeting etc.
** Amazon takes its leadership principles very seriously, hence I would suggest to attempt this round very seriously.
Next part of this interview was a couple of coding questions. The problems were pretty straight forward, very similar to the ones you solve on leetcode.
3 rounds of virtual interview
For this round I was supposed to talk to 3 of amazon’s engineers. Each of the round was of 45 mins duration.
Each of this round began with interviewer asking a behavioral question. The framing of the questions were on the line: “tell me a time when…”, “describe a situation when…”. This is a very important part of amazon’s interview process, hence I would suggest to prepare really well. Try to figure our a few situations from your work experience before hand and practice a few standard problems.
After the quick introduction and the behavioral question, the interviewer would ask to solve a coding question. The questions asked were pretty standard. I felt that there would definitely be a question which would be a bit difficult than the other two. Try to prepare topics like trees, dynamic programming and graphs really well. Amazon likes these areas (that’s what I think…:P).
** Best place to start preparing for amazon is completing the explore section of leetcode.
** For behavioral questions I followed this guy https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCw0uQHve23oMWgQcTTpgQsQ/playlists
Good luck!