My interview experience with Amazon for Security Engineer Internship

I have applied to this role in the end of Feb, 2024 and I have received a mail from the recruiter saying she’s taking me forward for the next steps. I was quite surprised. It was a great feeling since I haven’t heard back from any recruiter from quite a while!

I gave my schedule to the recruiter and got ready for the interview. It was a great feeling and the day of my interview arrived. I am well prepared with my leadership principles and all the other technical questions with behavioral questions to be answered in STAR format. It is a two hour interview. One hour with a 2–5 year experienced Engineer and another with a senior Engineer. We wouldn’t know if we will be joining their team as interns.

So, I started my interview with the video on(suggested step too). She told me about her and I have introduced about myself too. Then we spoke a little about our experiences and our little details that make us what we are today. It was a good talk. Then she started with behavioral questions that are to be answered in STAR format only.

Few questions might look like this (I’m not saying these are the ones)

Tell me about the time when you had to take a risk and your manager/leadership was not involved in this.

Tell me about the time when you took a task where you don’t have enough data or knowledge about

Tell me about the time when you submitted work or finished a task after the deadline.

These were to be answered in STAR format only. It would be great to talk more about your experiences than the shorter answers since they want to know more about how you started it, how you tackled it and how you rectified it.

Then came my technical round.

See a few topics related to the below

Tools you use for security

If PC is attacked, what kind of measures do you take?

Where do you start if your PC is effected or have any issues in the network?

OWASP top 10

Few more questions related to web security.

I almost answered everything and the technical round went well. Don’t forget to ask questions to the team. They would appreciate it.

Second round:

We did self-introduction and we spoke for sometime related to the team and the daily activities of a Security Engineer at Amazon.

We went straight into the interview with technical Questions.

The questions will be mostly related to Web security, measures to implement it, cross site scripting, etc.

These are a few technical concepts asked and now came the behavioral questions.

Again, these are to be answered in STAR format.

It was an awesome interview and it gave a lot of confidence in me to go for more interviews like this. Though I didn’t pass the interview, it was great and it gave me an idea how Amazon functions in these kinds of interviews.