5 Useful Tips for Your Amazon Software Engineer Job Interview
Mottakin Chowdhury reflects on his Amazon software engineer job interview. This is his story as written for HackerNoon, lightly edited and published with permission.
How I got my Amazon software engineer job interview
In October 2021, an Amazon recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn about software engineer roles at Amazon.
Coincidentally, I was looking to relocate from Singapore. The prolonged COVID-19 restrictions took a toll on me, and I was looking to relocate to a different country.
What the recruiter phone screen is like at Amazon
The Amazon recruiter took no time to schedule a call. It was short and to the point. She asked typical job interview questions about my current role and responsibilities, my interest in Amazon, and when I could start.
She asked a few basic questions about data structures and algorithms on the phone screen. I didn’t expect the questions on the first call, but I guess they want to reduce the chances of wasting anyone’s time.
After the call, the recruiter sent me a link to the online assessment—the infamous Amazon online test on coding, leadership principles and system design. I received the test link right after the call and had one week to finish the test.
What the Amazon online assessment is like
The Amazon online assessment was an hour and a half long. The online assessment has three sections: coding, system design and leadership principles.
1. Amazon online assessment: Coding
The coding section had two problems. The first problem was similar to a LeetCode easy problem, but the optimal solution for the second problem was in the medium to hard range. The second problem in the assessment could easily be used in a tech company’s on-site job interview.
2. Amazon online assessment: System Design
The system design section had a few multiple-choice questions. There weren’t any surprises. The unit should be easy for software engineers with a solid fundamental understanding of large-scale system design.
3. Amazon online assessment: Leadership Principles
The leadership principles section asks for your preferences. You have to complete a series of which-one-would-you-prefer questions in response to different scenarios. There aren’t necessarily any right or wrong answers.
What is the Amazon software engineer on-site job interview like?
The Amazon recruiter scheduled a call one week after the Amazon online assessment. Typically, the next step of the Amazon software engineer job interview is a phone interview with an engineer, but I skipped ahead to the on-site job interview.
The Amazon software engineer on-site job interview was remote. The interviews were held over Chime, Amazon’s in-house communication platform, over two days. I had two rounds of job interviews each day.
1. Amazon software engineer on-site job interview: The first round
The first round of the on-site job interview at Amazon was about an hour:
- Introductions (5 minutes)
- Amazon Leadership Principles (20 to 25 minutes)
- Whiteboard coding exercise (30 minutes)
The leadership principles questions focused on my past experiences. The interviewer related to what I talked about, and I enjoyed our discussion.
An interesting thing about the interview: My interviewer asked me to write pseudocode. He didn’t care for syntactically correct code as one can always look up the right code.
The coding problem required depth-first search and was a LeetCode easy problem.
2. Amazon software engineer on-site job interview: The second and third rounds
The second and third rounds of the on-site job interview at Amazon were straight-forward:
- Introductions (5 minutes)
- Amazon Leadership Principles (20 to 25 minutes)
- Whiteboard coding exercise (30 minutes)
The coding problems for both the second and third rounds were LeetCode medium problems, which again, required depth-first search. The second and third rounds are very similar to the first round.
3. Amazon software engineer on-site job interview: The fourth round
The fourth round of the Amazon software engineer job interview is a system design round. Unlike the previous rounds, my fourth round interview had two interviewers. Although the second interviewer was shadowing, he asked some questions.
- Introductions (5 minutes)
- Amazon Leadership Principles (25 minutes)
- Whiteboard coding exercise: system design (30 minutes)
The coding problem was a typical system design problem. Unfortunately, the whiteboard session was not very interactive. The interviewers listened to what I said and nodded, and they didn’t ask too many questions.
The Amazon software engineer job interviews focus on the Amazon leadership principles. Discussions about the principles were quite extensive and sometimes, a bit repetitive. In my experience, Amazon’s on-site job interview is the least tech-heavy, as a significant amount of time in each round is spent on the behavioral job interview questions.