Hi, I'm Nick, and I run Amazon Bound where we help talented job seekers to interview
effectively with Amazon and other companies that practice behavioral interviewing techniques.
Today, I will talk about the SDE (Software Development Engineering) interview with Amazon.
How you can prepare for it and how you can perform highly during your SDE interview with
Amazon.
You should expect to hear two types of questions during your SDE interview.
One, are behavioral questions and, two, are technical questions.
Let's start with the behavioral questions, first.
The behavioral questions are going to be what makes or breaks your Amazon interview.
I would expect 70%+ of your interview with Amazon, to be comprised of behavioral questions.
Behavioral questions are questions along the lines of, 'tell me a time you did X', 'tell
me a case you did Y.'
And, in response, you should describe a professional accomplishment or a professional failure from
your career.
And, unpack that accomplishment or failure in the STAR/SOAR methodology.
You should prepare a sufficient number of those accomplishments and failures ahead of
time, and be ready to describe them during the interview, without repeating them.
So, that takes care of the behavioral part of your Engineering interview.
The second type of questions you will hear are technical questions.
Technical questions, in-kind, generally fall into three subcategories.
One, coding questions.
Two, System Design questions.
Three, Computer Science foundational questions.
Let's start with coding.
For your coding questions, you are expected to write code.
You will start out by writing the code logically, on a function-by-function basis.
And then, if asked, you should convert it to working code using code syntax, and so
on and so forth.
Also, when writing code, I would not worry about being highly proficient in any one particular
language.
Amazon would likely look past that.
They would want to evaluate your capability to write functioning code in pretty much the
language of your choice.
And then, if you have those foundational principles in place, they will teach you whichever specific
syntax and code they want you to know.
Lastly, depending on if you're interviewing for an SDE (Software Development Engineer)
or for an SDM (Software Development Manager) position, you will likely get a varying amount
of coding technical questions.
If you're going for an SDE role, you are definitely going to get coding questions to either write
code or debug code, in the language of your choice.
But, if you are interviewing for an SDM position, you might not even be asked to write code.
You might be asked to debug code, maybe.
But, Amazon is going to expect that you will lean on your engineers (in your team) to deliver
that coding output.
And, Amazon is going to focus on the other parts of the technical interview, instead.
What are those two other parts?
As I mentioned, System Design and CS foundations.
Let's talk about System Design next.
In your technical System Design questions, you will be asked to architect a system that
should be generally robust and deal with complex input-output characteristics.
For example, you could be asked to design a system that competes with Airbnb, or Netflix,
or Uber, or other systems of that kind of scale, that perform a similar type of functions.
When you design a system, you should make sure that you step back, you architect the
system first.
Take care of all the racing horses and all the building blocks.
And then once those are laid out, you should be able to go into any one of those building
blocks, in a sufficient amount of depth, depending on where the interviewer wants to take the
conversation next.
And, the third part of your technical interview is likely going to touch on things like databases,
algorithms, and other basic CS components such as, I don't know, breadth-first search,
depth-first search, and so on and so forth.
So, those are the three types of technical questions you can expect to hear during your
Amazon Engineering interview.
How do you get ready for these questions?
A good way to prepare is to look for prior questions that Amazon has asked in similar
interviews.
You can find these questions, hopefully with their corresponding answers, if you look on
Google, or Quora, or Glassdoor.
I also encourage you to check out a service called pramp.com.
It's a completely free service, which will enable you to practice in live, 1-1, peer-to-peer
interviews with other folks like you online.
Pramp.com will determine your level of technical competency and match you with other similar
folks online for live, peer-to-peer technical interviews.
So, to recap, in your SDE interview, you should expect to hear behavioral questions and technical
questions.
The best way to get ready for your behavioral questions is to prepare your professional
accompaniments and failures ahead of time.
And, be ready to discuss them in the STAR/SOAR format.
A good way to prepare for the technical questions would be to study coding questions, system-design
questions, and CS-foundational questions.
You can use resources such as Google search, Quora, Glassdoor, or Pramp.com, to prepare
for your technical Engineering interview with Amazon.
I hope this has been helpful.
If it is, please, subscribe to this channel.
And, ask us any other questions you have.
Or check out our website at https://amazonbound.today.
Thanks for watching.
Best of luck with your Amazon Engineering interview.
You got this.