Cracking Amazon's General Software Engineer Interview: Leadership Principles & Tough Technical Questions

Software Engineering
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amazon | Software Engineer | Interview Experience

Interview Date: Not specified
Result: Not specified
Difficulty: Not specified

Interview Process

The interview process consisted of three rounds.

  • First Round: A non-technical senior interview focused on behavioral questions, following Amazon’s leadership principles. The structure included:
    • Tell me about a time when…
    • Follow-up questions
    • If you could go back, what would you do differently

Candidates should prepare to guide the interviewer to stories they are comfortable discussing.

  • Second Round: Followed immediately after the first round, consisting of two one-hour technical interviews. The first interview was conducted by a person from the Vancouver office, which presented some challenges due to the interviewer’s accent and network issues. There were two questions:
    1. Design a lottery system with a linear relationship between spending and winning, aiming to find k winners with the highest probability.
    2. Write a validation function for an Amazon training courses catalog.

The interviewer asked several follow-up questions, including inquiries about time and space complexity, as well as the differences between BFS and DFS.

  • Third Round: After a 20-minute break, this round lasted one hour and was split evenly between behavioral and technical questions. The behavioral questions were similar to the first round, while the technical question involved system design for a package installer system that respects dependency resolution. A follow-up question was about handling a package with a payload to be passed during installation.

Throughout the interviews, the candidate explained their code as they wrote it, which seemed to be well-received by the interviewer.

Technical Questions

  1. Lottery system design (Linear relationships)
  2. Validation function for Amazon training courses catalog
  3. System design for a package installer with dependency resolution

Tips & Insights

Candidates should prepare stories aligned with Amazon’s leadership principles and practice explaining their thought process while coding. Familiarity with BFS and DFS, as well as complexity analysis, is beneficial.