Amazon AWS | SDE-2 | Dublin | July 2024

I have 5 YOE. Applied nowehere else except AWS because I really really like AWS. So I wanted to work for them.

Overal theme of all the LPs was around failures, bad decisions you made and how you recovered from them. Also around having backbone and disagreeing with management and customers. I noticed that there was an extreme emphasis on the leadership principles. so much so that some took an upwards of 40 minutes of just talking about LPs only.

Phone interview:
2LPs + DSA (Top K frequent strings) - (Went really well, The recruiter told me that the responses were great.)
The only round where the interviewer actually stuck to the 30-30 rule (30 minutes for LPs, 30 minutes for Technical)

All rounds were one hour long. did not split between days
Osite Round:
Round 1: LPs/beahvioural only (prolly a bar raiser because he explicitly stated that he is not part of the team I'm interviewing for)
Went really well, Never seen a person so calm, friendly and jolly. I could talk to that man for hours. He was someone who's actually excited to hear about your stories. He even wanted to chat around and talk about other stuff until next interviewers show up.
Was sort of surprised that no techincal questions were asked. However, he did ask technical questions from my leadership principle answers. Like why I did something like this and not like this etc.

Round 2: 2LPs + DSA (Concatenated Words https://leetcode.com/problems/concatenated-words/)
Never seen or solved this question before. I looked at the question and I told the interviewer hmm maybe we can solve it by Trie and DP (which is a possible optimal solution). But then i told him lets do brute force instead because maybe i'm wrong. Absolute idiot I am. nonetheless I coded the brute force. could not give the time complexity but explained the space complexity.

Round 3: 2LPs + System Design:
Top 10 Viewers of youtube/twitch stream. Suddenly had a severe migraine attack and became super nervous. Brain fogged up and I could only make a brute force architecture. I explained trade offs and how I could improve it. The interviewer didn't say anything bad or wrong about it but I'm sure he may not have been impressed. possibly the worst round. :(

Round 4: Hiring Manager: Again LP behavioural only. Was nice to talking to him. Getting to know how the team works and what they have in plan for future was interesting. I was expecting some technical questions but again I was surprised that there were none. There were no technical questions derived from LPs either

Round 5: 2LPs + LLD (Unix search as usual): https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/609070/amazon-ood-design-unix-file-search-api)
Went good. A really coperative, friendly and nice interviewer.

No result yet as its only been a day or so. Leaderships went well. I did not lie or make up any story. While I'm praying to God that I succeed. However, I assume I will most likely be rejected mostly due to system design. Nonetheless, I am happy that I at-least got a chance to interview.

Edit: I got the offer :) The interviewers were extremely impressed with my LPs and achievements. Regarding system design they think it was an acceptable solution. Not the best in terms of distributed systems but certainly still acceptable. Their feedback was that since I've mainly worked on silo isolation SaaS products they didn't really expect me to come up with a distributed systems solution. They did not think it was worth rejecting me as to them I had potential but my potential is being wasted in my current org by working on non-distributed systems. So I'm happy that everything worked out well. I won't let you down Amazon!

Also I would like to highlight please get familiar with this tool for system design : https://excalidraw.com/
I'm not sure if they use this tool for every system design interview, but it certainly was used for mine and I felt that its a bit wonky.