Location: Seattle
Rounds: 5 + lunch
My YOE: 2.5 Y
Grad: CS
Will not be sharing the actual questions - signed NDA but shared the resources so you can expect the type of questions
Round 1:
Non - technical - Duration 30 mins
- Tell me about yourself
- Why leave your job and go back to school
- What would you do if you realize you are going to fail, give me an example
- Give me an example where you got critical feedback and it was not actually your fault and how did you handle it.
coding - 25 mins
- A variation of 2Sum and 3Sum
- LL intersection with followups not on LC
- Explain with an example how does the hash map or hash set has constant time lookup - no coding but had to explain why it is O(1) many follow up question to check if I was giving text book answers or I really understood the concept.
- Was asked a few questions on linear and non linear boundaries in classification because I had ML projects and papers on my resume.
Round2:
Non-technical: duration - 60 mins
- Many leadership questions - I cannot remember but mostly along the lines of effective communication and team work.
- Went deep into the stories and asked many followups.
- Randomly picked a project on my resume and and asked questions like planning, estimation, setbacks and conflicts.
- No coding but I feel this was the toughest round as I had to draw up high level designs for some of my projects on the white board
Round3: System Design - duration 60 mins
- Question is a very well known question and is available in the Grokking the System Design Interview trail version.
- I felt conifdent in the beginning only to be ripped apart with the followups.
- My advice would be to prepare SD at a level much higher than what is available on the internet especially if you did not implement high thruoghput systems before.
Round 4: Non - technical - 30 mins same as prev rounds
Coding - 30 mins
- Tricky and a variant of heaps question here on LC. There are only a few heap questions here on LC
- This could have also been done with DP. I did not solve it perfectly. If you can solve all heap hards on LC this question would have been easy to approach.
Round 5: Non technical - 30 mins same as prev rounds
Coding 25 mins
- Exhaustive search in a graph type question where there was no option but to launch search from every valid node.
- There might be a similar question here on LC but I do not know which one to tag.
- Interviewer asked me to justify the runtime and space complexities and tried really hard to break the code. We tested with many test cases but ran out of time towards the end.
White board only no laptop provided
In some rounds there were two people asking behavioural questions and talking about their teams a bit. Only one person asked coding
The over all experience was really pleasant
My prep
- LC amazon 100 - this is useful. I did not get an exact question off LC but reading through solutions helped.
- EPI book last 25 questions