Amazon SDE1 Interview Experience
This blog is for someone who aspires to be a developer at amazon and will apply for SDE positions or is in the interview loop.
I feel like we should document our failures as well as our successes. Both could prove out to be helpful for others. We all have to agree that blogs on success stories guide us through the process, but stories on failure stories teach us more. It tells us about the ways we shouldn’t go and what mistakes we need to avoid.
I had applied for the SDE new grad program in August 2020 but was rejected after the online assessment. I asked a friend to refer me for SDE1 position in amazon around April2021. For the next steps, recruiter contacted me and sent me online assessment. The questions were medium — hard. One of them was close to LeetCode problem 937 “Reorder data in log files”. I don’t remember the other one right now but will add it whenever i remember it.
I managed to solve both the problems and recruiter invited me for the next steps. I scheduled my interview date one month later. My recruiter was very sweet and helpful. She gave me a call and told me about the leadership principles i need to prepare as well as interview tips that were very helpful.
Interview Day:
I had series of four interview rounds.
Round 1:
There were two interviewers. One was interviewing me and other was just shadowing to learn interviewing skills.
Interviewer went really deep into my Machine Learning project asking me questions related to machine learning concepts, challenges i faced in the project, trade offs like why did i use a particular topic to solve the problem in my project, how did i figure out that i cannot improve my solution in the project, how did i measure accuracy, and related topics. I felt that i wasn’t able to answer these questions really well. He went onto asking about the challenges i faced working with team members in projects and internship experience.
The coding problem he asked was a medium level heap problem. I got 10 minutes to ask questions from the interviewer.
I felt that this round didn’t go really well since i couldn’t answer questions on machine learning and moreover i made couple of mistakes in my code and time complexity which interviewer pointed at and my code wasn’t very efficient.
Round 2(Hiring Manager):
There was one interviewer only in this round but another interviewer showed up in the end to answer my questions. This round started with a coding problem which was something similar to LeetCode problem 5 “Longest substring without repeating characters”.
He then moved onto asking behavioral questions like “conflict with team member”, “negative feedback from manager”, “toughest challenge in a project”, “earned teammate’s trust”, “couldn’t meet deadline”, “choosing between two options”, “went above and beyond” . After i answered his question, he would ask me “what would i do differently if same situation happens again” or “what did i learn from the situation”. Be prepared for questions like this. Interviewer had to remind me to tell about what i did in the situation, rather what the entire team did.
At the end, i got 20–25 mins to ask questions. The interview went on for 75 mins.
BREAK
Round 3(Bar Raiser):
There was one interviewer only in this round. This was a BAR RAISER round. I was sure about it since interviewer was from different department and he didn’t ask me any coding problems. He focussed onto behavioral interview questions. Questions like “time when i failed”, “next steps when i get to know that i am missing deadline”, “ went above & beyond for customer”, “simple solution to complex problem”, “time when i took calculated risk”, “time when i worked with incomplete information” and alike.
He asked about my favorite course which was Blockchain and he went very deep into it, asking me concepts like “what is blockchain”, “advantages of blockchain”, “why is blockchain secure”, “51% rule”and related topics (Cryptocurrency) which i hadn’t studied even. I couldn’t answer all the questions since i wasn’t prepared on it. At the end, i got 10 minutes to ask questions. The round was fun and went pretty good.
Round 4:
There was one interviewer only in the round. He asked me behavioral questions on team conflict, challenges working in a team, persuading team members for my approach and alike.
The coding problem that he asked me was similar to LRU Cache with many follow-ups. Follow-ups were related to system design of LRU cache, working of LRU cache etc.I was able to code the solution well and he was happy. The round ended by me asking him questions for around 5 minutes.
The recruiter reached out to me with a rejection email the following week and said that the team would be happy to interview me after 6 months.
Mistakes that i made in my interview:
- Didn’t go through my resume well. I should have read about each project really well.
- Used ‘we’ instead of ‘i’ in behavioral.
- Used more Starbucks stories, less of stories from projects.
Tips for upcoming amazon interview:
- Prepare two stories on every amazon leadership principle and answer them in STAR format.
- Think out loud and confirm question well before thinking of the solution.
- Must do top 50 amazon questions. They really do repeat in interviews.
- Prepare resume really well.
- Think before saying anything. Everything you say is going to attract questions on it. Be prepared for follow-up questions in that field (in my case blockchain).
Hopefully i will clear amazon interview the next time and will definitely create a blog on the interview rounds! Follow me if you are interested in the upcoming blog on amazon interview loop!
Comment down if you want to know about anything specific in the interview or process.
Hope you had fun reading this blog and learnt a lot too!
Happy reading!
