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Spencer Lepine
Spencer Lepine

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Preparing for My Amazon Front End Engineer Interview

#applications #interview #amazon

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After my recent interviews with Amazon for the Front End Engineer role, I thought I should share my experience and advice. I got numerous requests on LinkedIn about my interview experience, so I decided to document everything to pass along.

TL;DR - practice LeetCode, practice vanilla JS, always verbalize your thought process, prepare stories to share in the STAR framework, and be confident (or fake it).

If you are interested in general advice for landing your first role in tech, I wrote another article about that: How I Became a Software Engineer at 20 With No CS Degree

For the Amazon FEE interviews, you can find a lot of material online, since thousands of people are applying to these roles. In this article I will share the resources that helped me and give advice on what to study.

Study Material & Resources:

Remember, your competition will get their hands on any information that helps them perform better in an interview. You should too. Get exposure to all the material you can, read/explore these resources to learn as much as possible:

Soft skills & Behavioral Questions:

First, let’s touch upon soft skills and behavioral preparation. You must learn about the STAR framework, as well as the leadership principles. My advice would be to prepare one story per LP, as you will need to share concise answers for behavioral questions. You can practice telling a story (conflict with coworker, time you applied advice from a peer…) in the STAR framework. STAR gives you structure to describe what happened with context and outcomes.

Every interview could start with a few behavioral questions. If you try to wing it and think of stories in the moment, it likely will leave a bad impression.

An important theme is that technical skills can easily be taught, soft skills cannot. A valuable candidate has great personality and collaboration skills with the team. If you were hiring someone, that is what you would look for. Many people have talent. What sets you apart is how you present/market yourself, being memorable/leaving an impression. It is essential to communicate well or have story-telling skills.

Technical Skills & Coding Challenges:

Now let’s talk about technical skills and the coding challenges. You may be curious about exactly what I studied to prepare for this interview.

Essentials to study:

  • LeetCode problems
  • Vanilla JS practice (practice building simple widgets)
    • Frontend system design basics

I would recommend practicing LeetCode style problems and exercise a problem solving process. Think about the input/output of the problem. Think briefly about edge cases/constraints. Write some pseudo-code first, then attempt the problem. A huge focus should be verbalizing your through process the entire time. Avoid going silent for too long, the interviewer is trying to understand how you work through the challenge.

Recording myself to solve LeetCode problems helped me a ton (like this video). It can be uncomfortable and you might be bad to start, but you will always improve.

In FEE interviews, you likely can solve coding problems in any language you prefer. Although you will need to know vanilla JS, you could solve a few problems in Python if preferred.

Specific to the Amazon interview, they will likely test your frontend skills building a small widget with plain HTML/CSS/JS. You may need to brush up on the DOM methods and syntax. I recommend building several small widgets to practice. Make sure you understand selectors, event listeners, and modifying styles with JS. If you are unsure what kinds of widgets I am talking about, look through [this](https://www.frontendinterviewhandbook.com/companies/amazon-front-end-interview-questions] page.

Something to note, they don’t always use an IDE for these interviews. This allows you to focus on the concept and the design. You save time since you aren’t fixing little bugs to get an HTML page rendered.

Lastly, for the front end system design, make sure you understand the basics. Get familiar with state management, performance optimizations, and accessibility. This playlist has TONS of detailed videos.

I will not go into detail about the specific problems I was given. You should find plenty of these in the links I shared above. This article should provide enough momentum to get started, and you will know best to study for.

Conclusion

All of this is biased to my experience, and you should look beyond just this article. Every new day you study, every hour you invest more time, your skills will sharpen. Focus on what you can control.

I hope you got some value from the article. If you are interested in reading more about my job searching and landing my first role as a software engineer, checkout out these articles:

Follow my journey or connect with me here:

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