Amazon Does an Intern Interview Again

Amazon'southward Internship and Total-time interview guide

I have given the Amazon interviews 3 times, twice for an internship and once for full time, for the role of a Software Engineer. Having bagged both internship and total-time offers, hither are some tips for those who dream of working for Amazon. If you are interviewing for a data scientific discipline role, these tips should be helpful to you for cracking the data structures/algorithm part of your interviews, and you'll also have to prepare for SQL and information science questions.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

Stride one: Getting an interview.

This is the hardest step in my stance. Amazon gets thousands of applications per year, and simply a scattering of those people get a gamble to interview for them. However, compared to other companies from the Big 5, Amazon seems to give a lot more people a hazard to interview, even in these COVID times, based on my personal observation.

• Apply online. Try applying via LinkedIn or from their careers folio. This is the least effective method to purse an interview, but information technology does work (this is how I got an interview).
• Apply via a career fair. Try attending virtual conferences and apply in their or your school's career fair for a amend shot.
• An fifty-fifty better style would be to go referred. Please get a referral Earlier applying, considering once you employ, the referrals don't piece of work. This happened to me and I regretted information technology because I had a friend working for Amazon and could have easily gotten a referral. Here'southward what he saw when he referred me.

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• Lastly, cold e-mail/message recruiters. Try reaching out to them on Linkedin and selling yourself.

Pace 2: The Online Assessments (OAs)

There will be 3 online assessments, for both internships as well equally new grad full-time roles. They are very similar, peculiarly the first two rounds.

You will get a chance to give all 3 assessments regardless of how you perform in whatsoever one particular OA, for instance, if you mess up the first one, y'all'll receive the second ane anyway. You will be promoted to an in-person round afterwards these iii based on how well you perform on all 3.

You'll commencement receive an acknowledgment e-mail from Amazon saying "We have reviewed your application for the XYZ position and would like to motility forwards with the next footstep of our interview process".

You will then receive the first OA. Each OA volition have a v-day deadline, and the next OA will be sent to you 24 hours later completing the current one. Hence the online assessment rounds should take approximately 15–xviii days maximum. You can inquire for an extension for any assessment but I wouldn't recommend that. Amazon tends to hire on a rolling basis and you might non get an offer solely because they have sent out the max offers and y'all'll be put on hold, regardless of how well you lot perform. This is because they give out a lot more than interviewing opportunities than their headcount requirement. This happened to me for the full-time office, and I received an offer alphabetic character two months after existence put on concur. So my advice to you lot would be to finish the OAs and schedule the final rounds every bit soon as possible.

The commencement OA — Debugging

The easiest OA in my stance.

Time: 20 minutes.

Questions: 7

Languages — Java, C++, C

For each question, you will be given a problem and a small solution for information technology. The solution will accept minor bugs (it will compile, but won't perform as expected). The bugs will be very minor (for instance, some variable in a for loop incorrectly set) and like shooting fish in a barrel to spot. However, the primal to this round is timing.

You volition have 2.five minutes per question and a couple of extra minutes buffer, and that is more than enough fourth dimension you'll need to solve all issues. And y'all don't have to prep for this circular, just the fact that yous are called for Amazon'southward OAs shows that yous are a good enough coder to notice these bugs.

Tips for this circular:

1. Do not panic. The only style you'll non perform well in this round is if you panic.
2. Skip a question and leave it for the terminate if you spend too long on it.
3. Run the lawmaking and look at the output instead of hunting for the bug in the solution straight. The output will give y'all huge hints on what is incorrect in the code.

The second OA — Coding and WorkStyles Assessment

The hardest OA in my opinion. It has 2 sections.

The first section is Coding.

Fourth dimension: lxx minutes

Questions: 2

Languages allowed- Java, Python, C++, C, C#

1 of the two questions volition be easy and the other one can be medium or hard.

Tips:

• Amazon has a huge tendency to repeat questions in their second OA, so if you do company-specific prep(which I do non recommend because it won't make y'all better at interview cracking overall), y'all'll discover a ton of questions found online are asked to you. So even if you are someone who grinds competitive coding and doesn't believe in company-specific prepping, I would surely recommend checking out Leetcode Amazon tagged questions or the questions hither a calendar week-ish before your 2nd circular because there is a huge possibility that you lot'll be asked one of these.
• The usual tip, regular practice on Leetcode, Hackerrank, or whatsoever of the other interview prep websites should help yous crack this round. Here's the plan I personally followed to get amend at smashing coding interviews.
• Add comments to your code, especially if you lot do not pass all test cases. Amazon has existent people reading and reviewing your code, and if you have a couple of failed edge cases, or if you accept a solution very close to an optimal solution and not passing a few test cases because of lack of fourth dimension, yous might clear the round regardless, if your comments prove that you lot knew how to solve information technology.
• Adding to the above point, making the lawmaking neat and readable is also important, and then utilize good variable names, etc. for brownie points.

The 2nd department is Workstyles Cess.

Untimed.

Extremely easy, information technology'south like filling out a survey. Just be your authentic self, they're trying to know y'all better and run into if you lot'll be a good fit. Brand certain you read Amazon's Leadership Principles beforehand so that you know what they care about.

The difficulty level every bit well as the type of questions for the first two rounds is the aforementioned for internship or full-time.

The tertiary OA — SDE work simulation

Time: They mention it's timed 90 minutes in the email. But when I started it, it gave me 4 hours. Probably a issues, but it shouldn't take you more than an hour.

This is a workplace simulator. You lot will be prompted with emails, videos, and instant messages from your virtual team members to solve various bug. For each scenario, you volition be provided with some options of how to respond, asked to either charge per unit the effectiveness of responses or select the best course of action. There volition also be internal wikis, code snippets, and roadmaps.

There was a pocket-size departure between the internship and full-time OA in this round. In the internship, yous are given a slice of code in the cease past your virtual managing director, and some logs, and asked to debug that code. This was not present in the total-fourth dimension assessment. The language was Coffee simply, so information technology might be a little inconvenient if Java is non your primary language. It was easy but tricky, and you could brand silly mistakes if you weren't careful.

Step 3: In-person interviews

After these three rounds, you lot accept to look to hear back on whether you have made it to the in-person rounds or non. I heard back inside a calendar week for the full-time position and heard dorsum after xix days for the internship. You never know when yous'll hear back, then stay patient.

Internship

• I, 45 minute long final round over zoom, with an Amazon Engineer.
• A question from your resume/past experience
• A couple of behavioral questions
• 1 Leetcode manner medium/hard question.

Full time (New Grad)

The number of interviews depends on how well you perform in the Online Assessments.

Starting time Category

If your OAs are perfect, 7/7 in OA1, laissez passer all test cases in OA2, and a cracking fit equally per the Workstyles Cess as well as OA3, you'll only have 1 final round. They will ask yous most how y'all approached and solved the questions given to you in OA2. AS Simple As THAT. Can YOU BELIEVE IT?! This has to be the easiest way to become a fulltime at a FAANG company.

Unfortunately, I did not fall into this category. So I cannot elaborate further almost whether they ask behavioral questions (they probably do) etc. Yet, I can elaborate on the 2d category, having experienced it starting time mitt.

Second Category

If you either had minor mistakes in your OA1 or OA2 (failed one/2 edge cases) or weren't that skilful a fit as per the workstyle assessments, at that place will exist three terminal rounds for yous, 45 minutes each.

• Every round will accept behavioral every bit well as questions from your resume/past experiences.
• There will exist at least one System Blueprint round, and ane circular with data structures/algorithm questions.
• If you lot solve your ds/algorithm question apace, you'll be given another one if time permits. Ideally, this should happen unless the very first question asked to you was very hard/detailed.
• There will be ane "bar-raiser" circular which will be harder than the other two. This round is weighted a lot more, and information technology is essential for you to perform well in this one. Your bar raiser interviewer has the ability to veto a candidate out, no matter whether other interviewers like the candidate or not.
• Existence a good fit is very important, apart from performing well in coding/system pattern. Get through the Amazon Leadership principles and set up 1 state of affairs/scenario that you will talk about for each principle.
• Format your behavioral answers in STAR format.

Southituation: Depict the situation.
Task: Depict your responsibleness/task list in that situation.
Action: Explain the verbal steps you took to accost information technology.
Result: Share the final result.

For example:

Tell me about a time you were under a lot of pressure. What was going on, and how did y'all get through it?

Situation: When I was an intern at Facebook last summertime, I had managed to complete the intern projection assigned to me three weeks before it was due. (notice the humblebrag — ever find ways to sell yourself!). I was working with the privacy team, and since I had a lot of time left, I wanted to piece of work on an Instagram task because I was fascinated by that production, existence a heavy user of the app.

Task: In that location was a user query well-nigh ****(can't mention hither because of privacy reasons) on ****, internally, between Instagram and Facebook, and I decided to take over the job.

Action: I become into the technical details well-nigh everything I did hither, including the steps I took, the number of people I reached out to. I would draw the numerous bug I faced considering information technology was the kickoff fourth dimension I was interacting with the Instagram side of code. I would further elaborate on how my internship was ending soon and it was doubtful whether I'd be able to finish before my terminal date, which increased the pressure.

Result: I would draw how I successfully managed to stop the task, a few hours earlier my access was disabled on the concluding solar day. (!) I would so talk virtually the positive feedback my team gave for completing an additional task apart from my assigned projection, and what I could have done to end the task earlier, now that I know nearly all my mistakes.

Afterward completing the last round, you lot'll hear back in vii business organisation days. If you perform well, you'll either receive the offering letter or exist put on concur depending on how many offers they have given out already. If y'all're put on hold, there is no guarantee yous'll receive an offer, it depends on whether people who did receive 1 deny it.

That's all I have to say virtually the Amazon interviews. For article updates, submitting topic suggestions, or questions, follow me on Instagram! Feel free to send me a bulletin if yous have any questions.

Edit: You tin can fix 1:1 Career coaching with me where I can help you land internships by sharing my exact strategies, revamping your resume, embrace letter, or Linkedin profile. Y'all tin can read reviews and schedule a slot by going to anjaliviramgama.com

Thanks! Signing off!

Anjali Viramgama

LinkedIn | Instagram

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Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/amazons-internship-and-full-time-interview-guide-af3c20455e15

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