Amazon SDE 2 preparation guide given by Recruiter via email

Question

Answer 1

Greetings!!! Please go through the documents and start preparing.

 

Prepare for your interview! At Amazon, we want you to feel and be prepared for your interview.

 

Review our SDEII prep guide to learn how to best demonstrate your skills and what to expect during the interview process: https://www.amazon.jobs/software-development-interview-prep?cmpid=ECOTOT700005B

 

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJN9ydlFnJsiEH_U9guHTNs6H2tH00h9S

 

Core competencies:-

 

Loop Competencies: System Design (HLD and LLD), Coding, Problem Solving, Data Structures, Algorithms, Computer Science Fundamentals, Amazon Leadership Principles

 

Link to know why and what competencies required for SDE2: Software Development Topics
Must watch Video links: Leadership Principles, Coding Sample, and System Design.
Additional Links to prepare: SDE Interview Questions - https://github.com/rishabh115/SDE-Interview-Questions/tree/master/Amazon, 70+ System Design Interview Questions - https://github.com/sid24rane/System-Design-Interview-Questions, System Designed Explained - https://medium.com/@narengowda, 

, How to design Large Scale Systems and questions with solutions - https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer, study guide - https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer, approach etc - https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer.

 

 

 

PS: Always the competencies shuffle. Please be prepared in all aspects and be ready for the interview. Good Luck.

 

To help you prepare better for your Amazon interview, we encourage you to focus on:

 

Significant technical accomplishments, where you innovated or solved for critical business problems
Your technical strengths and opportunity areas with specific reference to your professional experience
Your potential to create technical impact by solving for Amazon customer related problems
Coding & Problem Solving

 

You will be expected to write production quality code and NOT pseudo code
Optimize the code and check for edge cases, null cases, happy cases, etc. before you present the code
Should be able to take into account run-time/space-time complexity, in order & preorder traversals, whether a null is a BST and whether a single node is a BST
Should be able to optimize the code, modular programming, & dynamic Programming.
Syntax, Return statements, Function declaration, Recursive code (mandatory)
Pointer manipulation, scope of variables, O (log n) lock and O (log n) unlock, initialization
Data Structures & Algorithms

 

Choose a programming language you are proficient with and practice working on fundamental data structures such as list, set, map, tree and graph
Practice with sort, search and traversal algorithms and different problem solving strategies like divide and conquer, dynamic programming, backtracking and recursion
· You will need to reason about computational complexity for your solution so it is important to understand time and space complexity of these algorithms

 

Design:

 

The expectation is that you should provide a detailed design of the system
In most cases your design should contain a clean set of APIs, the entities and the sub components
Be prepared to come up with class level design and code of the critical section
For the class design think what design patterns may be applicable
During the interview we not only look at the final design but how you reached there so please be vocal of tradeoffs and assumptions you are making
Consider discussing alternate design choices you have considered
Do not limit yourself to an abstract, high level block diagram
Draft the high level solution and ask which area the interviewer would want to go deeper into
Highlight important use cases

 

Problem Solving Skills

 

Listen & understand the problem statement completely before attempting the solution and avoid jumping to the solutions directly (seek 100% information).
Let the interviewer know your thought process: Think aloud. Declare your assumptions and state what choices you are making to solve the problem.
Start with the outline of your solution and get deeper into details as you arrive at the code
Some programming languages have implementation for many data structures available as part of their standard library
Ask more clarifying questions and be receptive to hints provided by the interviewers. Pick up on the hints to improve solution.
Interviewers are not typically looking for correct syntax but are looking for right implementation of your logic.
Take time to construct sample inputs that exercise boundaries and edge cases of your solution.
Dry run your implementation against those inputs before the final review
Walk through your solution with examples
Remember you should:

 

Articulate and express your thoughts in a crisp and clear manner
Make the interviewing experience more interactive
Check for understanding
Amazon Leadership principles: At Amazon we don’t just assess the technical capability but we also make sure that you are a good culture fit. Our engineers demonstrate leadership principles relevant to their roles. Please visit https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles to know more.

 

We are delighted to announce the release of a new video on the Interviewing at Amazon landing page on amazon.jobs.

 

This video-

 provides prospects and candidates with tips to get familiar with Amazon’s interview style (Leadership Principles, Behavioural questions and Star Method).

 

 

 

Note: While we share this information with you, we also wish to inform you that the scope of the interview is not limited to the above inputs only