I have given the Amazon interviews 3 times, twice for an internship and once for full time, for the role of a Software Engineer. Having bagged both internship and full-time offers, here are some tips for those who dream of working for Amazon. If you are interviewing for a data science role, these tips should be helpful to you for cracking the data structures/algorithm part of your interviews, and you’ll also have to prepare for SQL and data science questions.
This is the hardest step in my opinion. Amazon gets thousands of applications per year, and only a handful of those people get a chance to interview for them. However, compared to other companies from the Big 5, Amazon seems to give a lot more people a chance to interview, even in these COVID times, based on my personal observation.
There will be 3 online assessments, for both internships as well as new grad full-time roles. They are very similar, especially the first two rounds.
You will get a chance to give all 3 assessments regardless of how you perform in any one particular OA, for example, if you mess up the first one, you’ll receive the second one anyway. You will be promoted to an in-person round after these 3 based on how well you perform on all 3.
You’ll first receive an acknowledgment email from Amazon saying “We have reviewed your application for the XYZ position and would like to move forward with the next step of our interview process”.
You will then receive the first OA. Each OA will have a 5-day deadline, and the next OA will be sent to you 24 hours after completing the current one. Hence the online assessment rounds should take approximately 15–18 days maximum. You can ask for an extension for any assessment but I wouldn’t recommend that. Amazon tends to hire on a rolling basis and you might not get an offer solely because they have sent out the max offers and you’ll be put on hold, regardless of how well you perform. This is because they give out a lot more interviewing opportunities than their headcount requirement. This happened to me for the full-time role, and I received an offer letter 2 months after being put on hold. So my advice to you would be to finish the OAs and schedule the final rounds as soon as possible.
For each question, you will be given a problem and a small solution for it. The solution will have small bugs (it will compile, but won’t perform as expected). The bugs will be very minor (for example, some variable in a for loop incorrectly set) and easy to spot. However, the key to this round is timing.
You will have 2.5 minutes per question and a couple of extra minutes buffer, and that is more than enough time you’ll need to solve all problems. And you don’t have to prep for this round, just the fact that you are chosen for Amazon’s OAs shows that you are a good enough coder to find these bugs.
One of the two questions will be easy and the other one can be medium or hard.
Extremely easy, it’s like filling out a survey. Just be your authentic self, they’re trying to know you better and see if you’ll be a good fit. Make sure you read Amazon’s Leadership Principles beforehand so that you know what they care about.
The difficulty level as well as the type of questions for the first two rounds is the same for internship or full-time.
Time: They mention it’s timed 90 minutes in the email. But when I started it, it gave me 4 hours. Probably a bug, but it shouldn’t take you more than an hour.
This is a workplace simulator. You will be prompted with emails, videos, and instant messages from your virtual team members to solve various problems. For each scenario, you will be provided with some options of how to respond, asked to either rate the effectiveness of responses or select the best course of action. There will also be internal wikis, code snippets, and roadmaps.
There was a small difference between the internship and full-time OA in this round. In the internship, you are given a piece of code in the end by your virtual manager, and some logs, and asked to debug that code. This was not present in the full-time assessment. The language was Java only, so it might be a little inconvenient if Java is not your primary language. It was easy but tricky, and you could make silly mistakes if you weren’t careful.
After these three rounds, you have to wait to hear back on whether you have made it to the in-person rounds or not. I heard back within a week for the full-time position and heard back after 19 days for the internship. You never know when you’ll hear back, so stay patient.
2nd Technical Round: Again asked Tell My About Yourself. There were 2 coding questions asked. Q1. Large number sum using Linked List. 2 Approaches: Reversing the linked list and then adding or Recursion. Gave both the solutions. Then the question was: In case of a billion digits, which would you prefer? Recursion has a lesser time complexity but, a normal system won’t be able to operate so much on recursion, as there will be a stack overflow. Hence for a billion digits we have to go with reversing the linked list and then adding each digits.
Q4. Questions on Networking What is BGP(Border Gateway Protocol)? What is Link State Routing? How does it work? What is OSPF? TCP/IP model and OSI model.
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1st Technical Round: General question of Tell My About Yourself. Following this were technical questions mainly coding. Q1. Find the position of the rightmost set bit. I gave various approaches, firstly dividing by 2. Then they asked for a solution using bit operations. Gave them solution using OR. Q2. Time complexity of Binary Tree: Searching, Inserting
2 Technical Rounds: They take time in declaring results as they ensure that all eligible candidates make it to the Technical Interviews. Technical Rounds also consists of coding. Here, you need to discuss your approach with the interviewer and then code it on paper.
You will get a chance to give all 3 assessments regardless of how you perform in any one particular OA, for example, if you mess up the first one, you’ll receive the second one anyway. You will be promoted to an in-person round after these 3 based on how well you perform on all 3.
This is a workplace simulator. You will be prompted with emails, videos, and instant messages from your virtual team members to solve various problems. For each scenario, you will be provided with some options of how to respond, asked to either rate the effectiveness of responses or select the best course of action. There will also be internal wikis, code snippets, and roadmaps.
There will be 3 online assessments, for both internships as well as new grad full-time roles. They are very similar, especially the first two rounds.
Action: I go into the technical details about everything I did here, including the steps I took, the number of people I reached out to. I would describe the numerous problems I faced because it was the first time I was interacting with the Instagram side of code. I would further elaborate on how my internship was ending soon and it was doubtful whether I’d be able to finish before my last date, which increased the pressure.
The difficulty level as well as the type of questions for the first two rounds is the same for internship or full-time.
it was a long discussion and after she was satisfied with the approach I was asked to write a fully functional code of the problem.
one should read and apply The 14 LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES (https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles) of Amazon to answer these questions.
Question 1: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/boolean-parenthesization-problem-dp-37/. i was asked to solve the above problem in the most optimal way i started with the bruteforce solution and we discussed the optimisations until the interviewer was fully satisfied and then he asked me to write a fully executable code
i was asked to do it in O(n) time and O(n) space i started with the bruteforce solution and we discussed the optimisations until the interviewer was fully satisfied and then he asked me to write a fully executable code
Technical Interview Round 2 (50 minutes): After around 1 hour of round 1, I received a link for the 2nd technical round. The interview started again the interviewer introduced himself and asked me to introduce myself. Then he asked me to describe my internship work and one of my project the discussion took 15 minutes and then we jumped to the coding questions.