状态：2年经验，MS CS
职位：亚马逊的SDE 1
地点：华盛顿州西雅图市
日期：2019年5月17日
A recruiter reached out on LinkedIn and sent the coding challenge.
Technical phone screen (coding challenge):
- Modified version of two-sum problem. Given an array of size n and a target number, return the indices of k pairs whose sum is closest or equal to the target. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/given-sorted-array-number-x-find-pair-array-whose-sum-closest-x/
- Shortest distance between two cells in a 2-d grid - https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/shortest-distance-two-cells-matrix-grid/
After finishing the challenge, they moved pretty fast. The recruiter called and said that there’s a hiring event and flew me out to Seattle in a couple of weeks. Nice hotel in downtown Seattle, close to Amazon HQ.
Onsite was in Day 1 building. 3 coding, 1 system design
Onsite (4 rounds):
- Leadership principle questions - 1) Talk about a time when you did not deliver something as per schedule. 2) Talk about a scenario when you failed. Coding question - Write a program to implement the
findutility in Unix. Given the path to a root directory, and the name of a file which might be present in any of its nested directories, the program should return the path of the file if it exists, otherwise return false. Similar to https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/shortest-path-unweighted-graph/ - Leadership principle question - Talk about a time when you had to cut corners to deliver something. Coding question - Write a program to evaluate expression tree - https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/expression-tree/
- Leadership principle question - Talk about a time when you gave a simple solution to a complex problem. System design question - Design a Distributed Hash table that works at internet scale
- Leadership principle question - Talk about a time when you invented something. Coding question - Write a program that given two anagram strings, returns the minimum number of swaps to turn one to the other. Similar to https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-swaps-to-make-two-array-identical/
结果：大约一周后，收到了据信。
Thoughts: Onsite travel, accommodation and expenses were very nicely handled, the customer-obsession shone here. Nice office, found the interviewers to be passionate and personable.