If you are highly eager to work with a top tech company, you need to understand how to succeed at cracking interviews.
I have interviewed at Amazon and learned a few important lessons along the way. I hope this blog will help a lot of people who are interested in learning about the process. So, this is a short post on my experience with Amazon’s interview process.
The Preparation:
The first breakthrough was when I started off my preparation through InterviewBit. I strongly believe coverage on the site is extensive and a month’s prep scanning through various programming sections would set confidence level higher enough to attend the interview with confidence. However, I felt I could have prepared more on software Design.
The Interview:
In order to receive an offer from Amazon, you will have to clear 5 rounds of interviews and for me, all of them were on-site.
Round 1:
Here, the test planning and execution are the two main points focused upon. As my previous experience involved both functional and automation testing, they were considering my profile for SDET/SDET 2 & QA2 roles. There was a debate on how efficiently the test activities were planned and an array of cross-questioning related to the execution and worst case scenarios.
Most of the time questions revolve around “How will you handle timeline slippages?” and risk assessing factors.
Round 2: Two programming questions
a). There is a playlist containing a recently played list of songs. Every time a song is played either from the recently played list or a new song added to the list, the most recently played one should come on top of the list. No extra space is permitted and operations should happen in place. Use appropriate data structure.
b). There are 52 cards. Shuffle the cards, for the next 52 shuffles, there should be a unique card. For every iteration shuffle the cards and print it. No extra space to be used and operations should be in place. Use appropriate data structure.
Round 3: Managerial
This was a casual round to understand what are your aspirations and where do you fit in.
Round 4: Two Design questions
I don’t remember it completely. But, this can be a deal maker in either becoming SDET 2 or settle with SDET. Here, a fair idea about the design principles and experience with an actual application will help.
Round 5: Bar-raiser
This is mostly about demonstrating Amazon leadership principles. They even asked me to explain one of the projects in-depth.
Some Useful Tips:
Interviewers usually take a lot of notes during the course of the interview, don’t let it break your problem-solving flow.
With a proper strategy and regular practice, no interview is too hard to crack 🙂