Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon, USA

Status: CS Graduate Student
Past Experience: 2 years in Software Development
Position: SDE Intern at Amazon(AWS)
Location: Online/Video
Date: March 28, 2019

Interview Details:

Online Assesment Part 1 (Date: Feb 20, 2019):
Code Debugging (20 minutes) - Java/C/C++: 6 questions easy or easy to medium level debugging. Candidates are not allowed to modify the code completely but find bugs in logic. All the test cases are revealed.
Logic Ability (35 minutes) - Series of problem-solving multiple-choice questions. Mostly quantitative aptitude and charts questions.
Experience Survey: A survey on the testing platform. Okay :slight_smile:
Online Assesment Part 2 (Date: Feb 27, 2019):
Coding (70 minutes) - Java/C/C++ - Two questions 1 easy and 1 medium. My suggestion would be here to practice Leetcode’s Amazon Easy & Medium High-Frequency questions. Focus more on Tree and Graphs.
Work Style Assessment (10 minutes) - Behavioral questions, around 10.
Experience Survey: Another survey on the testing platform. Uggg -_-
Final Video Interview (March 28, 2019):
Video Interview on Amazon Chime. Live coding at Amazon’s proprietary software LiveCode.
That was a 45~50 minutes interview, mostly on live problem-solving.
Brief introduction about the interviewer and his ongoing project.
I introduced myself and discussed a similar project that I was doing. The introduction went up to like 8-10 minutes.
Coding question: As I’m not allowed to share the question (which I definitely remember). A hint would be - Solve LeetCode Binary Search card first a few problems. Trust me the question was exactly similar. :wink:
I discussed a naive way(O(n)) to solve the problem, then solved the question in O(log n).
Suggestion: Speak out load, in any live coding interview, interviewers want to listen to your thought process, practicing in LeetCode helps in notepad coding if you can do in whiteboard that’s even better. Do sanity testing while coding and explain each step and test cases, exit conditions properly.
Heaps and Heap Sort - Why heap data structure exists and how it works.
Tell me about a time when you had an opinion difference with one of your seniors and how did you resolve it.
Any questions for me? My time to interview the interviewer! Yay me!
I asked him mostly about the project he mentioned earlier, what difficulties they faced and how did they solve those. I explained some of my works(somewhat similar), he was impressed by my approach, naive but efficient for smaller sets.
Thanked the interviewer, he thanked me for my time. Have a good day. :slight_smile:
Verdict: At the 32nd hour, you may take a guess. :smiley:

Compensation: $7200/month

Pros:

  • Clean process, they update the job profile regularly.
  • The interviewer was highly experienced in his field. Knows volume.
  • Online assessments were hassle free.
    Con:
  • About 1 month between Online Assessment 2 and Final Interview. I kind of lost hope in between.