Anything I say to introduce this internet giant or its world famous CEO will be superfluous. Suffice it to say that getting a position in Amazon will not be easy. They are looking for only the best and even the second best won’t do. As Jeff Bezos himself said. "I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person". If you’re in the first or second year of engineering, you have plenty of time to learn. The difficulty level is about the same as a Google interview so check out our Google interview coverage here and here.
Usually freshers are recruited for the SDE 1, (Software Development Engineer 1), SDET (Software Development engineer -Testing), QAE (Quality Assurance Engineer) and SE (Support Engineer) position. An SDE full time in India usually makes 15 LPA. Here’s the lowdown on the process.
Eligibility Criteria: The candidate must have a B.Tech/B.E with 65% minimum throughout.
Roles and Responsibilities:
Code, and finally execute useful enterprise-level systems that can support a wide set of practical business applications.
Responsible for the end to end sys-dev life cycle of a key product or its sub-system.
Make available evaluation metrics to various feedback decks and report all performance indicators to fulfill target objectives.
Design, develop and deliver new systems.
Understand performance, scalability, enterprise system architecture.
Recruitment Procedure:
For SDE 1 most of the recruitment happens through campus placement drives. These rounds are as follows -
Written Exam
Technical Interview
HR Interview
Written Exam consists of 3 sections i.e. Mathematical Aptitude, Verbal Ability and Technical.
The Mathematical aptitude section usually contains questions on time, speed & work, percentages, profit and loss, ratio and proportion, probability, triangles, and functions.
The Verbal Ability sections mainly contains questions on reading comprehension, sentence correction, identifying error in a sentence and synonyms & antonyms.
The most important part of the test is the technical section which contains questions about C, Data Structures and Database Management Systems.
There are 30, 30 and 45 questions per section (subject to change from campus to campus), respectively. No negative marking and allotted time is 120 minutes.
There are 2 technical interview rounds, the first one of which is relatively easier. It checks for your subject expertise in data structures and algorithms. You also must know how to code fluently in at least one language. At fresher level, it’s usually C or Java and they prefer if you can use it in a Linux environment. The interviewee is asked 2-4 questions, most of them from data structures. The most frequently asked areas of study are matrix, binary tree, BST, linked list.
The second technical interview round for checking if you can apply your software engineering problems to solve problems. They might throw word puzzles at you or might ask you questions that are designed to sound like random puzzles. The questions are harder and are usually from trees and BST. Tree-based recursion is a good bet and you must have a good command over it. This round can put a lot of pressure on you if you’re not prepared. This is an elimination round.
If you are selected in technical round 2, you are invited for the HR interview. Here, the objective is to figure out your personality traits and to see if you’re a good match for the company culture. Do not be lulled into a false sense of security by the “soft sounding” questions as even in this round you might get a curveball technical question. Other than that, reply politely but confidently.
If you make it through THAT, you go to the bar raiser round. Amazon has a unique way of conducting interviews. Bar raisers are non-HR employees who volunteer to ensure that only the best candidates even after all the traditional rounds can enter Amazon.
Nihal Ahmed from Shri Krishna College of Engineering and Technology, Coimbatore reports the exhilarating experience that was the Amazon interview for SDE. He impressed his interviewers in the technical round so well that he was sent straight to the bar raiser round. And boy, did they raise the bar. Nihal’s edge was that he could offer multiple solutions to a given problem and he could explain his thought process. Check out his interview experience here.
Preferred Qualities:
A likely to be selected candidate must have a deep understanding of basics of CS for example algorithms, data structures, object oriented design and databases.
They must be outstanding problem solvers and able to break down complexities into simple, easily solvable problems. Must show creativity and good judgement.
Communication, both verbal and written is important so as to enable you to adapt to constantly changing and challenging development environment.
Your system interacts with many other systems and subsystems. You are required to think interactively and dynamically to encompass all interdependencies and limitations.
Being a team worker is not enough. A good Amazon employee must be able to collaborate not just with their own team but be good at inter departmental collaboration over various geographies.
In addition to technical expertise, business leadership also required.
Must be a high accountability individual who owns their project.
How To Prepare: There are many online, offline, paid and free methods of preparing for interviews but my favorite is John Washams’s “Coding Interview University” On GitHub. If you are in the first or second year you can finish the whole course by the time it’s your turn for campus placements but if you're a third or fourth year student just go through the important parts such as data structures, systems architecture and algorithms. If you’re REALLY out of time just go through this list of Amazon coding interview questions.
Hope you get to be an Amazonite soon. If you found this helpful write us a line. We’d love to hear from you.
Piyush Tainguriya
An engineer by education, writer by profession and a stand-up comic by vocation. I'm only half joking though.
January 25, 2018
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