Recruitment process for Amazon.
Hi, I am a 2020 engineering grad, just made it to Amazon and here to discuss the procedure. The entire process may seem intimidating at first but go ahead keep preparing and you will work with Amazon or any company you want to.
I will focus more on the syllabus and types of questions than exact questions , because believe me probability of intersection tends to zero here.
It all began with a referral , yes you can reach me out for it . I was referred by my senior in June. Didn’t receive any response then. After 2–3 months, a recruiter reached out to me with a coding test link, which was active for a week. I completed the test the next day I received it and glad I did.
CODING ROUND
It was total of 2 hours. There were 3 sections in total.
- Coding Challenge and coding approach (105 minutes)- I was given 2 medium level coding questions one with priority queue and other one with dynamic programming. I completed the first totally and the second one almost 80% test cases passed. After the coding questions I had to write in words explaining the approach for both the questions along with their time complexities .
- Work style survey (20 minutes)- It had around 35–40 questions asking about my reaction and approach to very real life scenarios . It basically checked the cultural fit. The questions were similar to “would you prioritize a task that was assigned to you and had a near deadline , or a team mate who is stuck in a problem you can solve”. There is no right answer or a wrong one, it’s just perhaps to know you better and if you fit in their values.
I cleared the coding round and got a mail from the recruiter for the live coding / telephonic interview round. It was 30–40 minutes long with one question, I had to explain my approach to her and code along the way and dry run the code as well. It was a little complicated version of summing up the top view of a binary tree. It went amazing and right after the interview in about 10–15 minutes I got a mail that I have cleared it and they want me to go through the interviews now.
INTERVIEW DAY 1 :
I had two interviews scheduled for this day , one in the morning other at noon.
FIRST INTERVIEW : I was asked two coding questions and three behavioral. The first coding question was from stack and string , similar to removing k consecutive letters from a string recursively . Like “aassbbbs” for k=3 will be aa. The second question was designing a data structure which can delete, add, retrieve data in O(1) time .I did it with a dequeue plus map. For all the questions full working code was required. The behavioral questions are tough , it is a combination of technical difficulties I faced in my previous projects and internships and how are they align with Amazon’s leadership principles.
SECOND INTERVIEW : It was a difficult interview with two interviewers and I initially thought I screwed up. First question was a time complexity question. I saw two loops and went ahead and said n².Later when asked by interviewer to reconsider , I realized it was tricky and came up with a longer time complexity equation. The second question was a hard level one. I was given a pseudo code and asked what the code is doing and then eventually asked to write the most optimized version of that code. Explaining this question is beyond the scope of words, it took around 40–45 minutes in the interview for this question. No time was left for more , but both were quite happy.
INTERVIEW DAY 2 :
It was an interview with the hiring manager . It dealt mostly with OOP concepts and design patterns than DS/ALGO . It had questions from DBMS too . I was asked to design a class by which only one object could be created . It had lot of follow up questions and tested my C++ skills extensively . I had no idea about singleton class then but designed and coded it for the first time in the interview with guidance , a lot of it definitely. And it had a lot of behavioral question on my previous internship and freelance projects.
I was initially said on the basis of feedback of first three interviews my fourth round will be scheduled or not. But since my first and second went good, I was informed about fourth right before my third interview.
BAR RAISER ROUND :
It started with behavioral questions. For around 30 minutes it focused mainly on behavioral questions. Then we had a casual conversation to lighten things up. I was then asked a question which was about validating equations . For example a>b, b>c and a>c , it is a valid set of equation whereas a>b , b>c and a<c is invalid. I did it by creating a graph , an adjacency list representation and then finding a cycle . Discussed it with the interviewer and since we were running short on time I was asked to code it in 5–10 minutes . I went ahead and coded it . It went amazing.
TIPS :
DS ALGO is super important for Amazon and so is writing production level code. For Behavioral you have to be very thorough about the projects and internships and align them according to Amazon’s leadership principle.
