Overview
I recently gave an interview for the Amazon SDE-III role for the Alexa UK team and would like to share my experience in this article.
PS: You can read a more detailed version in my medium article here
Hiring Process
- 1 Technical Screening Round
- 5 Onsite Rounds
- Final Offer
Initial Screening (60 minutes)
The interview was conducted by an SDE-3 engineer. He covered 3 aspects :
- Problem-solving: Check if the given word is a concatenation of 2 words in a dictionary of words
- System design: He asked to expose the above solution as a service and scale it to handle a large number of requests.
- Behavioral Questions: He asked me a situation where I made a wrong design choice.
NOTE : I've signed an NDA, so to be safe I will not disclose the coding and system design questions
Onsite Round 1 (60 minutes)
I was interviewed by the hiring manager who is a Senior SDM. It was mostly behavioral. He asked the following:
- situations where I gave direct feedback to peers.
- situations where you mentored junior engineers.
- situations where you worked on a challenging project with lots at stake.
In the final 15 minutes, he gave a system design problem.
Onsite Round 2 (60 minutes)
The interview was with a Principle Product Manager and was completely behavioral. He asked the following:
- situations where I worked on an ambiguous project.
- situations where I had to convince the entire team to break the norm and do things differently.
Onsite Round 3 (60 minutes)
The interview was conducted by a Principal Software Engineer. Initial half he covered behavioral skills and asked the following:
- situations where you had to go beyond your comfort zone.
- situations where you had to persuade your stakeholders to take a different approach.
In the latter half, he gave me a coding problem which was a medium difficulty leetcode problem based on linked lists.
Onsite Round 4 (60 minutes)
The interviewer was an SDE-3 engineer and he started off with the following behavioral questions:
- situations where you disagreed with your team’s solution and convinced them with yours.
- situations where you had to make a difficult decision.
- situations where you had to agree with the team even though you disagreed.
In the second half, he asked me a medium coding problem which was a slightly modified form of a typical DP question.
Onsite Round 5 (60 minutes)
I think this was the Bar Raiser round and was again conducted by an SDE-3 engineer. He covered the following behavioral questions:
- situations where you had a simple fix for a complex problem.
- situations where you had an innovative idea that made its way to production.
In the second half, he gave me a hard leetcode graph problem.
Final Offer
The recruiter assured me that they will get back to me in 5 working days regarding the offer. On the 4th day, the recruiter called me and said that they won’t be making an SDE-III offer and if I’m interested they could find me an SDE-II opening which I politely refused.
For more interview experiences like this check out my articles here
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