amazon | Software Engineer | Interview Experience
Interview Date: Not specified
Result: Not specified
Difficulty: Not specified
Interview Process
The interview process consisted of three rounds. The first round was a non-technical senior interview focused on behavioral questions, primarily centered around Amazon’s leadership principles. The structure included:
- Tell me about a time when…
- Some follow-up questions
- If you could go back, what would you do differently?
Candidates are advised to prepare stories that highlight their strengths.
The second round was directly after the first, consisting of two one-hour technical interviews. The first interviewer was from the Vancouver office, and the connection was a bit unstable. There were two questions, and the initial conditions provided were minimal, leading to an extended clarification phase.
- The first question involved a lottery system with a linear relationship between spending and winning, where the candidate had to find k winners with the highest probability.
- The second question required writing a validation function for an Amazon training courses catalog.
The interviewer asked several follow-up questions, including time and space complexity, and the differences between BFS and DFS.
After a 20-minute break, the third round commenced, lasting one hour and comprising half behavioral questions and half technical questions. The behavioral questions were similar to those in the first round. The technical question focused on system design for a package installer system that respects dependency resolution.
Follow-up: What if the package has a payload we want to pass to install?
The candidate explained their coding process while writing, which the interviewer found acceptable.
Technical Questions
- Minimum Number of Refueling Stops (Priority Queue, Heap, Linear Relationships)
- Isomorphic Strings (Depth First Search, DFS, Topological Sort, Directed Graph, Cycle Detection)
- First Bad Version (Graph, Topological Sorting, System Design, Package Management)
Tips & Insights
Candidates are encouraged to practice storytelling for behavioral questions and to be prepared for technical follow-up questions regarding complexity and algorithm differences.