Introduction

Positions: software-engineer-new-aws-initiative-seattle

Amazon Ways

Earn Trust with the customer by making precise, high-bar promises and then keep them.
Make long-term investments - sometimes at the expense of short term gains.
Share the good and the bad to help customers make informed decisions.
Avoid the bland personality that customers typically associate with the big homogenous, corporate Borg.
Take credit for the impressive things the you do in a way that is subtle and sophisticated.
Speak to the customer in a tone that is neither boastful nor boring.
Use specificity when possible and sensible.
Title the features factually, with a degree of precision.
Don’t make content look like an Ad.
Stay away from creating new icons.

Amazon Divisions

Amazon Devices and Services
Amazon Marketplace
Amazon Web Services
Business Development
eCommerce
Kindle, Digital Content and Publishing
Retail
Worldwide Operations and Customer Service

Interview Tips

Be prepared to discuss technologies listed on your resume
Ask Questions where necessary - collaborate
Be concise and detailed in your responses - pause and see if the interviewer still wants to hear more on the topic?
Reflect on how you think a career with Amazon would be mutually beneficial?
Answer “Why Amazon?” properly - not just a checkbox question.
Take time and prepare a couple questions for the interviewer.

Leadership Principles

Customer Obsession

Ownership

Invent and Simplify

Are Right, A Lot

Learn and Be Curious

Hire and Develop the Best

Insist on the Highest Standards

Think Big

Bias for Action

Frugality

Earn Trust

Dive Deep

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

Deliver Results

SDE Principles

Drive Quality

Have Excellent Functional Skills

Deliver Results

Innovate and Simplify

Have Operational & Customer Focus

Communicate Clearly

Exercise Judgement

Demonstrate Engagement and Teamwork

STAR Approach

Situation / Task

Describe situation and context of the story
- Where did it occur?
- When did it happen?
- Why is it important?
Probing
- Why is it important? What was the goal?
- What was the initial scope of the project? What were the challenges?
- What were the risks and potential consequences if nothing happened?
Challenge
- Why did you choose this story to illustrate a xyz accomplishment?
- What other stories can you think of, to demonstrate xyz?
- Could you come up with a more recent example?

Action

What actions did you take?
- What did you personally own?
- How did you do it?
- Who else was involved?
Probing
- Deep probe functional expertise and/or assigned core competency.
- Were you the key driver or project owner?
- What was your biggest contribution? What unique value did you bring?
- What were the most significant obstacles you faced? How did you overcome them?
Challenge
- What did you do specifically versus the team?
- How did you set priorities… deal with xyz problem… or get manager buy-in?
- What decisions did you challenge? Why? How did you influence the right outcome?

Results

How did you measure success? What results did you achieve?
- Cost Savings, revenue generation
- Quantify to understand volume, size, scale?
- Percentage change, YoY improvements?
- Time to market, implementation time, time savings?
- Impact on the customer, the team?
- Quality Improvements
Probing
- Why did you choose to focus on these results? What other results were important?
- You mentioned revenue, what percentage change is that year over year?
- What trade-offs did you have to make to achieve this? (quality, cost, time)
- I’m concerned about… (The time it took, the volume, the customer impact), tell me more…
Challenge
- What were the lessons learned? What would you have done differently?
- How would you improve the process or result today?
- How would you implement this at Amazon?
- How did these results compare to your actual goals? (refer back to goal stated in Situation)

Technical Topics

Programming Languages:

Java / Python Syntax
memory management
commonly used collections, libraries etc.

Data Structures:

storing and accessing data efficiently
inner workings or common data structures and be able to compare and contrast their usage
runtimes of common operations
memory usage of common operations

Algorithms

understanding of common algorithms
traversals, divide and conquer, other common algos,
when to use DFS vs BFS, tradeoffs?
Runtimes, theoretical limitations
basic implementation strategies of different classes of algorithms

Coding

Syntactically correct code
code with pen and paper to practice
scalable, robust, well tested code
main criteria for interview, so practice well
handle edge cases, validate bad inputs
as close to production as possible.

Object-Oriented Design

extensible, long-lived, bug free code
good software design is critical for success
use object-oriented design principles
know common and useful design patterns
use inheritance and aggregation
not asked how each design pattern works, but should be able to defend.

Databases

Most software is backed by a data store
efficiently retrieve and store data
non relational DB movement, DynamoDB for All
tradeoffs between relational and non relational DBs
no expertise assumed

Distributed Computing

Systems at Amazon run with strict tolerance and high load
basic distributed systems concepts
service oriented architectures, map-reduce, distributed caching, load balancing etc.

Operating Systems

no designing an OS from scratch
memory management, processes, threads, synchronization, paging, multithreading etc.

Internet Topics

Amazon is an online business
how internet works
browsers, DNS lookups, TCP/IP, socket connections - know basic networking

Machine Learning and AI

data driven modeling, train/ test protocols, error analysis, statistical significance
formulate problem as a machine learning problem and propose a solution - include ideas for data sources, annotation, modeling approaches, and potential issues.
understand basic AI/ML methods and algos

Coding Practice

Leetcode - Amazon top 50 Problems

Easy - 1: Two Sum
Easy - 21: Merge Two Sorted Lists
Easy - 20: Valid Parentheses
Easy - 121: Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock
Easy - 937: Reorder Data in Log Files
Easy - 994: Rotting Oranges
Easy - 572: Subtree of Another Tree
Easy - 819: Most Common Word
Easy - 1099: Two Sum Less Than K
Medium - 200: Number of Islands
Medium - 146: LRU Cache
Medium - 5: Longest Palindromic Substring
Medium - 3: Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters
Medium - 138: Copy List with Random Pointer
Medium - 253: Meeting Rooms II
Medium - 973: K Closest Points to Origin
Medium - 380: Insert Delete GetRandom O(1)
Medium - 49: Group Anagrams
Medium - 240: Search a 2D Matrix II
Medium - 127: Word Ladder
Medium - 348: Design Tic-Tac-Toe
Medium - 347: Top K Frequent Elements
Medium - 692: Top K Frequent Words
Medium - 957: Prison Cells After N Days
Medium - 103: Binary Tree Zigzag Level Order Traversal
Medium - 545: Boundary of Binary Tree
Medium - 456: 132 Pattern
Medium - 1268: Search Suggestions System
Medium - 694: Number of Distinct Islands
Medium - 1167: Minimum Cost to Connect Sticks
Medium - 866: Prime Palindrome
Medium - 1102: Path With Maximum Minimum Value
Medium - 1152: Analyze User Website Visit Pattern
Hard - 42: Trapping Rain Water
Hard - 1192: Critical Connections in a Network
Hard - 23: Merge k Sorted Lists
Hard - 273: Integer to English Words
Hard - 297: Serialize and Deserialize Binary Tree
Hard - 642: Design Search Autocomplete System
Hard - 295: Find Median from Data Stream
Hard - 212: Word Search II
Hard - 140: Word Break II
Hard - 460: LFU Cache
Hard - 239: Sliding Window Maximum
Hard - 126: Word Ladder II
Hard - 472: Concatenated Words
Hard - 99: Recover Binary Search Tree
Hard - 588: Design In-Memory File System
Hard - 1044: Longest Duplicate Substring
Hard - 1000: Minimum Cost to Merge Stones