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Amazon SDE-II Experience, Seattle [NO OFFER]
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Received an Online Assessment Test some time last month, passed all tests, got an invitation to the onsite next day from the recruiter.
Round 1
LLD
First 30 minutes - two Leadership Principles, then LLD coding question - AWS specific scenario, something similar to building a UNIX file system where you can apply filters and search files accordingly. I was able to provide a satisfactory solution and the interviewer seemed pleased. Overall, this round went very well.
Round 2
Bar Raiser, Leetcode
First 30 minutes - two Leadership Principles, then a Leetcode Hard type of String question. Very similar to Work Break II, but the interview had changed it up a bit. I have solved this question before using a Trie and asked if I could do it using a Trie and the interview said it would be too complicated and edges cases would be hard to solve even though I had the structure memorized. At that moment I panicked and absolutely bombed the rest of the interview as I couldn't come up with a different solution. The interview was hard to understand (heavy accent) as well and I didn't quite understand the hints he tried to give me.
Round 3
System Design with Hiring Manager.
First 30 minutes - two Leadership Principles, then the HM asked me to essentially design AWS Lambda. Was able to provide a scalable, available, and a low latency solution that satisfied the interview. We discussed API Gateways, Load Balancers, NoSQL/SQL, Distributed Caching, etc. Overall, this round went very well.
Round 4
Leetcode
First 30 minutes - two Leadership Principles, then the interviewer asked me an AWS specific scenario that I used Binary Search to solve. The round went well and was more laidback than the previous ones. The interview seemed satisfied with my answers.
Overall
I would say my leadership principles were fairly strong, I prepared around 20 stories, made sure that they conformed to the STAR format, and demonstrated strong results. All the LP questions were fairly basic and exactly what you would expect (the recruited had already provided me with the LPs for each round). Except for the coding portion of the Bar Raiser, I did well in everything else.
I studied by doing all top Amazon tagged questions in Leetcode and Top 100 Interview questions.
Got a rejection email around 6 days later with no feedback and the recruiter ghosted me afterwards.