Amazon SDE interview experience

I applied through Amazon’s website, and just a few hours later, I saw that a recruiter viewed my LinkedIn profile. After a few days, they sent me an invitation for an online assessment.

Online Assessment

It included two LeetCode questions. I don’t remember much of it, but one question involved sets and another required figuring out suitable locations for warehouses on a number line based on certain rules.

After coding questions, I had a couple of system design questions. It was like a questionnaire where you choose which approach is best for some hypothetical system, e.g. choose which database is best for a voting system.

Soon after completing the assessment, I got an email inviting me to a phone interview.

Phone Interview

I thought the interview went great. I had answers for everything and I felt like I explained everything very well.

Behavioral Questions

• What’s a project you’ve worked on that had the most impact?
• What was the outcome, and would you approach it differently now?

Data Structures Discussion

• If you were building an “Undo” function, what would you use?
• How would you handle a PowerPoint-like slide editor that allows inserting slides anywhere?
• How would you structure a menu with effects for slides?

Coding Challenge

• The coding question was similar to valid anagram problem on LeetCode.

A few hours later, I got another email saying I had passed and they wanted to schedule a final round with four interviews.

Final Round Interviews

First Interview

This round included some behavioral questions and a coding challenge. I had a log file which had pages that users had visited and my task was to find the three consecutive pages users visited the most.

Second Interview

After a few behavioral questions, the task was to create a find function similar to the Linux find command, allowing filters like:

• find . -type f
• find . -size +4096c
• find . -name *.pl

It was not fun… I couldn’t understand what I was supposed to do, I first started writing a command line program. Later, I realized it was actually an object-oriented programming question and completed it correctly. I wasn’t ever supposed to finish the logic, just set up the classes and types.

Also finished the extra question about finding in subfolders using a simple recursive call.

Third Interview

The interviewer’s connection dropped, so we started a bit late. After a quick behavioral question about a time I needed to learn something new, I got a coding challenge, finding unique paths in a grid by only moving down and right, based on this LeetCode problem.

Fourth Interview

The interviewer asked a system design question: “Design an email service for Amazon using only one SMTP server.” I wasn’t prepared for this at all, but I managed to work through it somehow.

There were also a few additional behavioral questions.

Results

I thought I failed miserably because of the system design question, but they decided to extend an offer 🥳. The package was great, but it required me to relocate to Madrid.

After a few days of thinking, I decided to decline. It just didn’t feel like the right time for me to make that move.

Tips for interviews

• Practice LeetCode (I mostly watched NeetCode)
• Read about system design (Alex Xu books, Grokking the System Design Interview)
• Prepare your answers for behavioral questions (use STAR method)

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