Background:
Applied for Amazon SDE New Grad (USA), completed OA in April, interviewed on June 30. Felt confident — interviewers seemed satisfied. Got a rejection email on July 8. Email had a different job ID, but recruiter confirmed it’s normal — candidates get moved to a new internal req after OA. I genuinely thought I would get it because everything went well… but here it is.
Timeline:
• April 29: Completed the OA
• May 8: Got an email asking me to verify my photo
• June 10: Followed up with the same email thread to check in — didn’t get a response
• Mid-June: Recruiter got back to me and asked for availability (I didn’t get the survey email, so I just gave dates directly)
• June 30: Final round interviews
The Interview Process:
Round 1: LP
BQ 1: Greatest challenge. Follow-up: If you could go back to that time, what could you have done better?
BQ 2: Tight deadline. Follow-up: Did you have to sacrifice other tasks?
BQ 3: Leadership. Follow-up: Asked for some details, such as how I influenced others.
The interview primarily focused on Amazon's 16 LP principles. The conversation flowed smoothly, and follow-up questions were appropriate. The interviewer seemed satisfied with my answers.
Round 2: LLD+LP
LLD：Design Bit.ly
The core requirement is that users should be able to submit a long URL and receive a shortened version, and users should be able to access the original URL using the shortened URL. This is a brief functional requirement. Non-functional requirements include ensuring the uniqueness of short codes, redirects should occur with the shortest possible delay, system availability should take precedence over consistency, and scalability to support 1 billion shortened URLs and 100 million DAUs.
The core entities in a URL shortener are the original URL, the short URL, and the user. To shorten a URL, a POST endpoint is required, which accepts the long URL along with optional custom aliases and an expiration date, and returns the shortened URL. Here, I use the POST method because it is necessary to create a new entry in the database, mapping the long URL to the newly created short URL.
To implement redirection, a GET endpoint is required, which receives the short code and redirects the user to the original long URL. GET is the correct verb here because I will read the existing long URL from the database based on the short code.
For the high-level design, the main requirement is that users should be able to submit a long URL, receive the shortened version, and access the original URL via the shortened URL. I quickly completed the design and clearly explained the approach. The interviewer seemed impressed.
LP:
Q1: Describe how you handled an unreasonable customer request.
Q2: Describe a time when you failed.
As with the previous behavioral interview, you can answer using the STAR method combined with Amazon's 16 leadership principles.
Round 3: DSA
Q1: Auto-complete: Implement insertion, search, and search by prefix.
search(word) returns true if the word has been previously inserted. startsWith(word) should return a list of inserted words that start with word.
Q2: Given a string containing digits (from 2 to 9, inclusive), return all possible letter combinations that these digits can represent.
When I see a combination problem, I immediately think of DFS/BFS. This problem is a very pure search problem with nothing special about it.
Interview Summary & Suggestions
On July 8, I received a rejection email. I truly believed I would get the job. Everything seemed to be going smoothly, and all the interviewers were satisfied with my answers. Receiving the rejection email was more disappointing than I had imagined.
Despite this, I am still grateful for this experience. It has given me a clearer vision of the future, and I now know how to improve and do better. I hope this article can help those who have gone through a similar experience.
Those of you preparing for interviews, don’t lose heart after reading my experience. I hope my experience can provide you with some insights. If you encounter any difficulties during your interview preparation, feel free to come here for solutions~
Top comments (0)