Amazon software engineer interview Sobit Akhmedov. Jul 2. 01. 6I was recently contacted by a technical recruiter from Amazon. The company was hosting an interview event for software. Berlin office. The whole process from being contacted to signing the contract took two months. Software Development Engineer AmazonI would like to share my experience on. I believe helped me pass it successfully. If I failed to mention something important in this article, feel free to start a discussion in the comments section. Problems Installing Service Pack 1 Xp Home. There I will try to be as detailed as possible. I was contacted by the recruiter via Linked. Development Director Interview Questions' title='Development Director Interview Questions' />In. She told me they were looking for software engineers to join a team. Berlin office and asked me to send her an updated resume if it sounded interesting for me. I always tend to. I sent her an email with it attached. She responded with some general information about the role and the interview process. The first step was to conduct a. Hackerrank, which I received a link to separately on the same day. The exercise was limited to 1. I finish it before May 5th. I decided not to. May 1 Prescreening. Hackerrank has its own interview platform called Hackerrank for Work. That was the tool I landed on when I clicked on. It has a built in timer, a web editor with some sort of autocompletion for Java, problem. It was never communicated which languages the coding test would be limited to before I started it. Those I could choose. C, C, Java and a couple of others, which ruined my plans to use Go or PHP the languages I was the most. So I ended up choosing Java. The test consisted of three problems which could technically be solved in no particular order. Problems. The first problem was related to an object oriented design. Online shopping for Software Development from a great. The Software Engineers Guide. Cracking the Coding Interview 189 Programming Questions and. Amazon interview questions. Theres a certain kind of person who takes on the challenges of software development at Amazon. Software Development Engineer in Test. Explore Amazon Jobs. Home. Software Engineer Developer Interview Questions. Flag Amazon Software Engineer Developer. My Amazon interview. I applied to a Web Development Engineer posting for Vancouver. I was also asked a behavioral question specific to Amazons. Software Engineering HTML XML Engg. Tag Archives Amazon Amazon Interview Experience. Top 10 algorithms in Interview Questions. Mission impossible War stories from the Amazon. Interview Question. Software Development Engineer. Amazon Software Engineer interview questions and 1,073 interview reviews. Free interview details posted anonymously by Amazon interview candidates. Software Engineering. This post is about answers to the questions asked in Amazon Interview Set. OffCampus for Software Developer Walmart Labs Interview. Amazon Software Development Engineer interview questions and 1,605 interview reviews. Free interview details posted anonymously by Amazon interview candidates. I was provided with a few classes and their methods. The second problem was an algorithmic one. Here I will give you some advice which helped me personally before you. I did it on paper, realized how easy it was, and. However, a mistake I made was trying to further optimize it and make the code as beautiful as possible. I already had. all the test cases passing and should have instead used the remaining time to finish the last problem. Bad. prioritization. Lesson learned. The third and the last problem was about analyzing complexity for the solution given in the previous problem. I was. supposed to explain it as well as justify why I thought it was best from my point of view. However, I covered only the. May 4 Phone screening. The day after I received an email from the recruiter congratulating me on passing the technical test. She asked about. my availability for the week to schedule a phone call and review my technical skills before she could invite me to the. We agreed on May 4th. Brushup. I only had two days so I brushed up on the essentials in algorithms and data structures. Specifically, I focused on the. Sorting bubble sort, quicksort, merge sort. Search linear search, binary search. Data structures linked list, hash table, array, tree, binary search tree, stack, queue. Of course, you need to be able to argue about the complexity of algorithms and common operations on data structures. I personally found Wikipedia to be a great resource for this kind of analysis. Phone call. The recruiter was very friendly during the call we started by talking about completely unrelated topics, like the. We touched on almost everything from the above. I also received a few questions about dynamic programming and recursion. A couple of times I struggled with. Recruiters usually cannot dive deeply into technical topics, but she was very. I used to name them differently. Finally we discussed a few situational questions. I didnt have anything prepared, so had to remember and come up with. She then expressed her positivity about my skills and we ended up the call. At the same moment I ordered an interview. References section. And I ordered it on Amazon, by the way. June 2 On site interview. Shortly the same recruiter contacted me with two emails one had interview preparation tips and resources while the. The questions were mainly about my current status, how Amazon could help me. I filled it in and sent it back, and four days later I received a confirmation of the day and time of the on site. It was a new recruiter from the Berlin office. A week after she sent me a detailed schedule along with the. At that point it was helpful for me to look at their profiles on Linked. In to get an idea. I was going to talk to. Preparation. In total I had a little less than one month to prepare for the interview. I knew I wouldnt be able to finish the. I decided to solve three exercises from each section. The whole thought. Black color pen was used to write solutions, while red color pen was used to mark errors. The idea was to. have less red with every following exercise. Another good source I found for practicing coding skills was Leet. Code. As a coincidence, a friend of mine decided to. Thursday evening to work on Leet. Code problems together. Two weeks before the date I started writing stories for the behavioral questions. Most people tend to underestimate them. This is wrong Interviewers want to know you as a human being and understand if. What I found useful for myself was writing each story in a STAR format. I worked on following situations challenging problems, mistakes and failures, conflict handling, leadership examples. As advice, try to focus your stories on yourself and not on a team you cooperated with. That way, it will be easier. You should know exactly why you want to work for Amazon. If you dont, think twice about whether its the right place. Interviewers will know if youre not honest with them, and it will be a waste of time for all parties. After. all, why would you spend precious years of your life on something youre not truly passionate aboutMake sure you can talk about yourself. That includes both your story, which ideally covers your education, motivation. You might also want to prepare all the. Interview day. Candidates were asked to come in 1. I had to bring a passport and sign. NDA. One of the employees then welcomed me and took me to an interview room. There were four 5. Each interview contained 4. For the first interview I had to solve an object oriented design problem. I had to build an interface that client. It starts off easy and as you progress, the interviewer adds more. It was followed by the behavioral question on how I dealt with a failed deadline. The most important advice at this point do NOT start solving problems until you fully understand them. Think of. these interviews as brainstorming sessions talk to your interviewer, ask him questions, discuss your solutions, and. Another important advice if youre stuck, do ask for a help. The worst thing you can do is quietly stare at the. For the second interview I was asked to solve a product focused algorithmic problem. I needed to find the right. In the last. 1. 0 minutes we talked about the situation where I had a conflict with my teammate. For the third interview I was building a system design for various product use cases. I was drawing system components on. As a situational question I was asked. I had worked on something without getting approval from my manager. The last interview was a purely technical, algorithmic problem. It was relatively easy, so I started by asking whether I. He asked me to do the basic solution first. We iterated several times on that before we ran out of time. The interviewer. then asked me to tell a situation where I would have done something differently from what I actually did. My Amazon interview experience Jay Huang. It all started back when I was still working at SAP. A few colleagues mentioned Amazon was opening up another office in Yaletown. I believe it was in January 2. I wasnt very interested at first, but after hearing about it a couple times, I gave it some more thought and decided it wouldnt hurt. I was going to leave SAP at the end of April, and if Amazon turned out to be a good fit, I just might go there. This was before I interviewed and got offers for Palo Alto, one other company, and the company I worked for from May to July. There were a few listings on their website, so I applied to a Web Development Engineer posting for Vancouver as I felt it was the best match for my skills and experience. I wasnt actively looking for a job at that point, so I didnt think much of it and pretty soon, forgot I had even applied. Then, out of the blue, I was contacted by one of Amazons recruiters on May 2. I seriously considered declining it as I had just moved to my new job for a month, and was certainly not looking to leave yet. As many people know, I absolutely hate speaking on the phone. First of all, Im more of a listener, and when Im speaking with a stranger for the first time on the phone, that comes across as unenthusiastic or uninterested. Secondly, it forces me to context switch and break my mental train of thought. Whether or not its pre scheduled does not matter Im forced to abruptly pause my work and move my attention to something else. As a freelancer, I have the option to cut myself off from virtually any environmental disruptions, and prefer to allocate small time blocks to update or communicate with peopleclients. Third and most importantly, its synchronous communication. When I have to pick up the phone and speak to someone, not only am I making an expensive context switch, I have to be wary of tone, wording, and other things that cause the other party to misunderstand me. Aside from that, Im unable to give any issues more in depth and careful thought, which really defeats the whole purpose of discussing them. But in those recent months I had been looking to make a conscious effort to expose myself to more socialhuman interaction, so I decided I would give it a try. I had nothing to lose anyways I was working on stuff I enjoyed and this phone call would have no effect on me other than cause a bit more nervousness. Phone interview I took the morning off and made it up later to do the phone interview. When I picked up the phone the interviewer introduced himself as a Web Development Engineer from Seattle. Immediately I noticed the Indian accent and became nervous because I realized I already had trouble understanding him. He thanked me profusely for taking the interview literally 56 thank yous, which was quite unexpected but also helped relieve some of my anxiety. Nevertheless, we proceeded with the interview. We went on collabedit and he tested my understanding of some of the key features of Javascript, the design and implementation of a type of web component, a bit about HTTP and servers, understanding and application of CSS, and an algorithmic implementation question. The hiring team has really enjoyed speaking with you and we would like to schedule a time for you to come to Amazon for in person interviews Although I was able to answer all the questions, I was second guessing myself because I felt that I must have misunderstood something between the foreign accent and the poor phone connection. I thought that was the end of it and wrote it off as a nice experience. Then on June 1. 1th, I got an email from a different recruiter saying that they would like me to go in for on site interviews. Weird, I thought almost everyone who I knew that interviewed with Amazon went through 2 or more phone interviews before going on site. Im certainly not going to complain about having less hurdles to jump through. Upon reading the email more closely, I realize they want me to fly down to Seattle for the interviews. I was perplexed I thought the position was in Vancouver It was, they said. But they still wanted me to fly down. Paid flight, travel, food, and lodging Okay I guess Ill take a vacation day and head down. Better not forget my passportOh, passportlet me take a quick look. My passport was about to expire in 3 days. I quickly let the recruiter know and started the passport renewal process. After a long 3 weeks, I finally got my new passport. We scheduled the on site for Monday, July 8th, arriving Sunday around noon. Sunday comes around and Ive arrived in Seattle. I didnt have time to prepare for any of these interviews because of my full time job, my freelance work, and attending night school. I decided I would walk around and figure out how to walk to the building they have 7 in the area, and just roam a bit. Returning to the hotel, I headed to sleep early so I would be well rested. Unfortunately, I got no sleep that night. Something about the nice hotel bed or the fact that I was not doing my usual late night freelance work made me restless. Interview 1 My first interview was at 1. Amazon pays for your interview transportation expenses, which includes your flight taxi to the interview should you need it. I headed out at 9 3. I will not be sharing interview questions in this post just a broad overview, and sit there to calm my nerves. I wasnt nervous so much about the prospect of getting an offer or not as much as I was about sitting in a small room with a stranger and writing code on a giant whiteboard. There was a sudden change of the first interviewer, so it took him some time to come get me. Immediately upon sitting down, I was presented with a problem that was an integral part of Amazons marketplace websites. It was an algorithmic problem that the team had run into and solved, and on the front end. I wrote the algorithm in Javascript. Interview 2 The next interviewer came to pick me up and go to lunch. He introduced himself as a developer on the team, but was acting temporarily as the manager because the previous one left recently. I didnt have a specific preference in mind, so he took me to a small local sandwich shop where I ordered chicken ciabatta and he paid with a company credit card. He asked if I was interviewing for a position in Seattle, and seemed confused why I was flown down to Seattle when the position was for Vancouver. I was asked a lot of questions about my previous technical experience, technical challenges I faced, asked me to elaborate on some of the more interesting architectural solutions Ive implemented and discussed trade offs between other solutions. We had a pretty good discussion, but responding to his questions left little time to finish lunch, so he gave me the last 1. Interview 3 This interview did not involve writing code. The interviewer was the manager of a major team within Amazon. He gave me an algorithmic question also very relevant to Amazon, and I came up with a solution fairly quickly, but he noticed I was still deep in thought. I explained that it was the best solution I could come up with, but I was wondering if there could be a better way to do it. We ran over some of the details together, discussed potential trade offs in a different algorithm, and decided my solution could not be any more efficient. I was also asked a behavioral question specific to Amazons business and core values.