What Happens Behind The Scenes
Your recruiter is leading the process and taking you from one stage to the next. Here’s what happens at each of the stages described above:
- After the phone screens, your recruiter decides to move you to the onsite or not, depending on how well you’ve done up to that point
- After the onsite, each interviewer files their notes into the internal system, grades you and makes a hiring recommendation
- The “Debrief” brings all your interviewers together and is led by the Bar Raiser, who is usually the most experienced interviewer and is also not part of the hiring team. The Bar Raiser will try to guide the group towards a hiring decision. It’s rare, but they can also veto hiring even if all other interviewers want to hire you.
- You get an offer. If everything goes well, the recruiter will then give you an offer, usually within a week of the onsite but it can sometimes take longer
It’s also important to note that recruiters and people who refer you have little influence on the overall process. They can help you get an interview at the beginning, but that’s about it.
Faqs On Amazon Software Development Engineer Role
Q. How many SDEs does Amazon hire every year?
The actual number of SDEs hired varies as per the requirement of the company for that particular year. However, as the companyâs functioning is primarily based on technology, they hire fifteen thousand employees every year. The number greatly depends on the expansion of the company in that location and the companyâs needs.
Q. What is the salary of a software development engineer at Amazon?
The average salary will differ based on your experience. According to Level.fyi, you can make anywhere from $151,000 per year as an entry-level SDE to $490,000 as a principal SDE. For more information, read .
What Do Software Development Engineers At Amazon Do
Software Development Engineers are the drivers of technological innovations at Amazon. Their main responsibility is to build, invent and sometimes convert outdated practices into simpler and faster solutions.
SDEs at Amazon build scalable solutions to complex problems and leave an impact on millions of lives. At Amazon, Software Development Engineers are passionate, skilled, and open to exciting challenges.
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Amazons Internship And Full
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 full-time offers, here are some tips for those who dream of working for Amazon. If you are interviewing for a data science role, these tips should be helpful to you for cracking the data structures/algorithm part of your interviews, and youll also have to prepare for SQL and data science questions.
What Interviews To Expect
First, it’s important that you understand the different stages of your software engineer interview process with Amazon. Note that the process at AWS follows similar steps. Heres what you can expect:
- HR recruiter email or call
- Online assessment
- Phone screens: one to two interviews
- Onsite: four to six interviews
In most cases, the interview process starts with an HR recruiter call to discuss your interests and to see what group or team would be best for you. Your recruiter will also use this conversation to confirm that you’ve got a chance of getting the job at all. You should be prepared to explain your background and why youre a good fit for Amazon. If things go well the recruiter will then send you an online assessment or schedule your technical screen depending on the role you’re applying for.
1.1.1 Amazon online assessments
Amazon primarily uses online assessments for internship and new graduate positions, but also sometimes for experienced positions. You might have to solve up to three different online assessments before progressing to the technical phone screen stage.
OA1: Debugging
Important note: as far as we know, this online assessment is only used for internship and new graduate positions.
OA2: Coding questions
The second online assessment , is a set of two data structure and algorithm questions. Each question needs to be solved within a certain amount of time . And your code must compile for the two questions in order to move forward in the interview process.
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Amazon Software Engineer Programming Interview Questions And Tips
Though customer obsession is Amazonâs main principle, the organization also gives a lot of importance to its other goals â long-term thinking, commitment to operational excellence, and passion for invention. For this, Amazonians explore and develop new technologies every day, from Amazon Web Services to Alexa, in order to provide services that change lives.
Amazon attracts strong leaders and some of the finest talents in the tech world. The demand growth for different types of software engineers since 2019 has been anything from 5% to an unbelievable 1400% in the international job market. While full-stack engineers occupy the bottom end of this spectrum, the top end is filled with augmented reality and virtual reality engineers.
If you are a software engineer or are aspiring to be one, you have an immense opportunity at the top end of the spectrum mentioned above.
Before applying for that dream job at Amazon, there are few things to know about the interview process. In this article, weâll cover the following
Responsibilities Of Amazon Sde2
As an engineer, you will be accountable for the following:
End-to-end management of a product/feature for all stages of creation and manufacturing.
assuring that the built functionalities are expandable and easily deployable without compromising quality.
Collaborate directly with senior engineers to fine-tune and execute the design.
Project administration and implementation by project goals and deadlines.
Participate in the ongoing recruitment and growth of technical expertise, both intrinsically and extrinsically.
Work with corporate and project administration to establish and implement suitable quality goals, project schedules, evaluation methods, and procedures for developmental projects.
Intellectual property to be contributed through patents.
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Interview Process And Timeline
What’s the Amazon software development engineer interview process and timeline? It takes four to eight weeks on average and follows these steps:
Faqs On Amazon Software Development Engineer Interviews
1. What’s Amazon’s Software Development Engineer interview process, and how do I get started?
Amazonâs interview process for SDEs looks something like this:
2. At Amazon software engineer interviews, do I need to qualify every round to get an offer?
Yes, at Amazon tech interviews, you need to pass every round to be able to qualify for the next.
3. What is the Amazon âBar Raiserâ interview?
Amazonâs Bar Raiser interview is conducted by experts to see that for each competency that they test, you are least as good as or better than the average Amazon SDE. It is a crucial step in Amazonâs hiring decision process.
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What Is The Amazon Interview
What exactly is the Amazon Interview? What should you expect when you walk into the room?
The majority of the Amazon interview consists of coding, and this is what the focus of this post specifically will be about. For strategies regarding how to ace your system design interview, consult the following post from Byte by Byte.
Lets break down the primary components of what the Amazon Interview consists of.
Dynamic Programming Related Interview Questions
About 12% of all the questions asked at Amazon interviews require software engineers to use their skills in stacks and queues. Some of these questions are:
- Design a stack to push, pop, top, and retrieve the minimum element in constant time.
- Given: n non-negative integers representing an elevation map. The width of each bar is 1.Task: Find out how much water rainwater it can trap.
- Given: An m x n matrix with the following properties: Integers in each row are sorted in ascending order from left to right, and Integers in each column are sorted in ascending order from top to bottom.Task: Write an algorithm that searches for a value in the matrix.
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Know The Leadership Principles
Technical skills constitute 100% of a hiring decision. The other 100% is guidedby the leadership principles. The ratio might be be accurate , but what I want to highlight thereis that most books and advices do not dive deep on this topic while this is very important. Knowingthe leadership principles shows your culture fit and your understanding of the company principles. If you do not know them:
Learn them.
Learn and show you understand them. Connect your own experience with these principles.Explain how you apply customer obsession, frugality, bias for action or learn and be curious in youractual job. Doing this will prepare you for your interview.
This is an important part of an interview because these principlesdrive our work every day in the company. Showing that youunderstand and follow these principles is key.
Also, do not make up stories, be sincere, real. If you do not know something, say itand ask for more clarifications or to have another question to evaluate you. This is very easy for an interviewerto see when somebody is making up a story.
How To Prepare For Amazon Sde Interviews
Nishit explains that most candidates struggle either with their confidence or with their interview preparation routine. He says that the best way to prepare for an interview is to go back to getting your fundamentals right.
You should constantly be trying to apply your skills through various assessments and projects on your own. In HLD, the key concepts like sharding, applications, hashing, etc. become quite important for clearing your interviews. Therefore, having your fundamentals clear can help you not only land the job but also on the job where you constantly need to learn new skills and come up with new ideas.
Nishit recommends GeekforGeeks as an excellent resource to get your concepts sorted. He also mentions that consistently working on problem-solving questions along with a few other role-specific questions can help. Try to satisfy each prerequisite for the SDE role by taking ample time to develop the said skills.
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Amazon Software Development Engineer Interview Process
The amazon software development engineer interview process is lengthy and exhaustive. Hereâs what you can expect:
1. HR interview: The preliminary step of the interview is focused on understanding the candidateâs interests and why the candidate would be a good fit for the company. Once the recruiter is satisfied with your answers, you would be given an online assessment to solve, or a technical screening would be scheduled based on the profile you have applied for.
2. Amazon Online Assessments: This online assessment is usually a part of the hiring process for interns and fresher candidates. Sometimes, it is also included for experienced candidates. The assessment has three sections:
Read for more information.
What Is The Salary Of Sde In Amazon
Amazon offers competitive compensation for its employees. The standard Amazon Software Development Engineer salary is approximately $120,000 per year. Software Development Engineer salaries at Amazon can, however, fall between approximately $63,000 $202,000. As salary amounts can vary, it is best to check the job description of the specific SDE job-role you wish to apply for.
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Here’s The Guide For Problem Constraints:
** The above table is an excerpt from the ACM ICPC World Finalist 2011. The original blog post can be found here
P.S: Practicing all these problems doesn’t guarantee you a job at Amazon. It all depends on your thought-process, luck and hard-work. Take these problems as a reference to build your problem solving skills.
Behavioral Interview Questions Asked At Amazon
These questions are usually general behavioral questions that are asked to most applicants and are based on the leadership principles of Amazon. For example:
- Tell us about a time when you faced a problem that had multiple solutions. How did you go about the situation?
- Tell us about a time when you took a calculated risk and failed. What were your learnings from it?
- Tell us about a time when you had to take the lead in a project. How did you fulfill your role?
- Tell us about a time when you had to work with an uncooperative colleague. How did you go about it?
- Tell us about a time when you leveraged massive chunks of data to build a strategy. How did you execute it?
Read for more.
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What Is The Biggest Challenge Amazon Is Facing Today
The Biggest Challenges for Amazons New CEO
- Growing scrutiny. Regulators around the world are examining Amazons business practices, specifically the way it looks at information from businesses that sell goods on its site and uses it to create its own Amazon-branded products.
- Growing the cloud. Amazon is known as a place to buy books or toothpaste.
- Retail threat.
How To Prepare For Amazon Software Development Engineer Interview
Invention is in Amazonâs DNA. Amazon believes that technology is a fundamental tool for evolving and improving customer experience. Every action taken in Amazon must prioritize customers. You need to apply this customer-first ideology to the coding, system design, and behavioral questions you answer.
As for technical interviews, Amazon insists that they do not expect you to memorize all technical topics. What they are looking for is your ability to solve a given problem based on what you already know.
Pro Tip: If you have less time to prepare, review computer science fundamentals, and practice coding outside an integrated development environment.
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Amazon Software Development Engineer Roles And Responsibilities
Amazon looks for software engineers who believe in the power of innovation. If you like to solve highly complex problems and dream of impacting lives on a global scale with your work, Amazon is the perfect workplace for you.
Amazon fosters a work culture of learning and curiosity and wants to hire people who want to make the world a better place.
As an SDE at Amazon, you will be required to:
- Build innovative, high-volume, and mission-critical software solutions.
- Shape the vision, definition, roadmap, design, and development of product features.
- Innovate new technologies to deliver game-changing products and services.
- Design and implement critical features in front-end, back-end, or full-stack systems.
- Understand the requirements of customers and bring a consensus between multiple teams.
- Learn new technologies and train new teammates.
Note: There are 4 levels of Software Development Engineers at Amazon: L4 , L5 , L6 , and L7 .
Onsite Interview Or Personal Interview :
This is the final and the toughest stage of Amazonâs selection process. You can expect to remain onsite at the Amazon office throughout the day to face four to six sessions of PI rounds. Each of these sessions is usually an hour-long, and you will be asked various types of questions during these sessions.
- Coding Questions
The first session of PI will be focused on analyzing your skills in data structures and algorithms. You will need to solve these questions on a whiteboard.
- System Design Questions
The next one or two sessions will be aimed at understanding your level of expertise in system design. The difficulty level of these depends on your level of experience and qualification.
- Behavioral Questions
Behavioral questions will be strewn all across these PI sessions, and you will have to answer several such questions focusing on the Amazon leadership principles.
- Bar Raiser Round
The name the Bar Raiser comes from the fact that the interviewer conducting the last round has the power to veto your application if you fail to meet the bar. In this round, youâll essentially be assessed on . For applicants interested in the position of an Amazon senior software engineer, interview questions of this round are considered the most important.
For tips and preparation tactics for the Amazon onsite interview, read our article .
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Get Used To Coding Under Time Pressure
As you already know, your online coding assessment will be timed. So, its crucial that you use a timer while you practice coding questions at home.
Try to analyze how much time every part takes you and finetune it. For example, see how long it takes you to read and understand the question.
The more you practice working under time pressure, the less you will be panicked on test day .
How To Prepare For Sde 2 Role At Amazon
- Very standard interview loop, similar to the other FAANG companies.3 coding interviews, 1 behavioral, and 1 systems design.Amazon puts a lot of focus on the leadership principles and all five interviews will ask you at least 2, so have answers for how you demonstrated each of them.System design interviews ask 1 system design question and 2 LP questions Coding interviews ask 1 leetcode question and 2 LP questionsBehavior interviews ask 3 LP questionsNov 14, 202023+ View 1 more reply…
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