I was fortunate enough to participate in Amazon’s Nashville hiring event. I have a master’s degree in Computer Science and about 4 years of experience in software engineering.
第一轮
Interview with an SDE member of the team. Started off with 15-25 minutes of behavioral questions. The rest of the time was devoted to a fairly unique coding problem that I couldn’t find an immediate LeetCode equivalent of. It had a lot of cases to consider which were more of a focus than the actual runtime complexity. Would rate it a LC medium in difficulty.
第二轮
Interview with a senior SDE. Started off with behavioral questions like before. Instead of a coding challenge, I was given a distributed systems-based design challenge. The interviewer chose to dive into a certain component of the design and ask me to code up an algorithm related to it. I felt this was the easiest technical round in the whole hiring event.
第三轮
Interview with the non-technical hiring manager. As expected, this was all behavioral. In addition, there were some questions related to my skillset and preferences that the manager was using to think about where I could fit in.
第四轮
Back to an interview with an SDE. This round was a lot like the first. The coding challenge given was a well-known LC medium question that relied on a more infrequently-used data structure. At the end, I was asked about the runtime complexity of the algorithm.
Overall, I felt very confident about the interviews. I had a lot of work experiences to share and I weaved important leadership principles into all of them. As for my coding solutions, I don’t think some of them were 100% optimal, but they all worked and offered a nice view into my thought process as I was doing them. I definitely enjoyed interacting with the team and tackling the challenges presented to me.
To prepare, I did several LC medium questions, created flashcards based on Amazon’s leadership principles, and studied system design guides.