I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Cape Town) in Jan 2021
Interview
First Stage in the interview process:
Phone Interview (1hr) (2 coding questions) - typical questions that are asked in a 2nd-year Computer Science exam (Level Leetcode medium)
Onsite Interviews (Virtual) (Typical FAANG interview):
1) Behavioral Interview with Senior Development Manager
2) Behavioral Interview with Senior Program Manager
Technical Interviews:
(3 and 4) Coding Assessments - Data structures/Algorithms/Optimization (Level Leetcode Hard)
5) Design a System at a High Level (And then dig deeper)
*All interviews focus on Amazon Leadership principles
The onsite interviewers definitely used a crappy method to evaluate a candidate.
I've been in the Software Industry for over 3 years now, and I have never seen or been asked to answer such irrelevant bs questions before.
I felt that I was well prepared for this interview. I answered many Leetcode questions, analyzed Grokking the System Design Interview and Cracking the coding Interview, etc.
The technical interviewers spent at least 30 minutes focusing on Leadership Principle questions. Which meant that I had only 30 minutes remaining to answer the difficult algorithm/problem-solving questions.
The senior Development Manager was unable to answer some of the questions that I had asked him.
The last interviewer (SDE) did seem pretty stuck up. He stated that the more senior developers within his team/unit lack many technical skills.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Behavioral - LP and Current Projects
All coding questions - Level Leetcode Hard
System Design - Design DropBox, Instagram, etc type questions
Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
Um teste de código online, se aprovado, vai para o loop. O loop é 4 entrevistas seguidas, duas em inglês e duas em português. 3 entrevistas técnicas de código, todas as 4 têm pergunta de liderança.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pergunta historicas baseada nos principios de lideranca da amazon.
