Amazon Frontend Engineer Interview Experience 2024, Berlin

Frontend engineer interview experience at Amazon 2024

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Recently, in Oct 2024, I appeared in the Amazon interview. Going through Amazon’s interview process was a challenging yet rewarding journey, one that pushed me to my limits as a front-end engineer.

If you are preparing for an upcoming interview or planning to apply for a role at Amazon, I hope this guide can help you.

Let's get things clear Amazon or any FAANG interview is not a piece of cake, it is quite rigorous and challenging. That requires a solid understanding of Computer Programming Fundamentals and problem-solving skills.

You can not just go through the internet search “top 50 JavaScript or frontend interview questions” or just revise all data structure concepts like Tree, Graph, Sorting, Searching, etc. or just solve 20–30 questions on leetcode while preparing for the interview. These techniques will never work. It just doesn’t.

Interview with FAANG, can be really challenging and draining for you, be prepare to fail even after month of hard work and preparation. If you really do not want it, just do not do it. Seriously it take lot of time and weekend to study and prepare, if you invest some amount of time to learn new library or framework or even do freelance, that would have some good learning and extra for you.

Even if your profile is shortlisted and you get a chance for the interview, only start the process if you are 100000% sure to join Amazon at the end of the interview.

A company like Amazon spends quite a of time, resources, and money in the hiring process. Think like if you are Amazon, you just have 4–5 hours of interaction and have to make a decision to hire someone with a handsome, best-in-industry compensation package. It is a quite risky game for Amazon as well. what if they hire the wrong one? 🤔

The candidate doesn’t have the required productivity and is unable to fulfill the role and responsibility and as a company, you can only take action in the yearly performance review or half-yearly performance review.

So it is a lot of risk and investment(time and energy) for both the party in the whole interview process. Here is how my timeline was almost 4–5 months. I stuck with the interview process, following up, scheduling, and waiting for results in between.

Interview Details and Timeline

Role: Frontend Engineer (FTE I) at DealX

Location: Berlin, Germany

Application Submitted: 21st June

Received Online Assessment: 8th Aug

Completed Online Assessment: 13th Aug

1st Phone Interview: 17th Sep

2nd Phone Interview: 7th Oct

Final Interview Round 1: 28th Oct

Final Interview Round 2: 28th Oct

Final Interview Round 3: 29th Oct

Final Interview Round 4: 29th Oct

Without going further in different directions of the interview preparation and my learning, I will directly jump into the process and go throw each round in detail.

Online Assessment

Once, I received the online assessment link and a deadline to complete, I quickly brushed up my JavaScript and DOM manipulation, along with data structure and algorithm, and problem-solving.

Test Time: 2 hours Question: 2 (Based on DOM manipulation) 1 hour for each problem

Q1. Design an accordion collapse component using plain JavaScript.

This is a very simple and straightforward problem statement, However, I keep reusability, code readability, functions, test comments, and modify DOM in an optimized way.

When the given problem statement is simple, that means they want to judge how beautifully and optimize the solution you can provide.

Q2. Design a Data Table Component with a search option

This was also simple and straightforward, no brain teaser, no DS algo stuff. I was able to finish all the functionality required in the problem statement.

Data Table Functionality: 1. Dynamic Row Addition 2. Use local storage as a data store, populate all rows on page refresh 3. Search bar allows user to search based on a typed phrase (Implemented debouncing here) 4. Filter table based on search phrase, If it matched with any column data

Once I finished my test, My feeling, was it an Amazon test, all the time, I was preparing for some crazy tree, graph question, or sort algorithm, but I almost did well in these JavaScript DOM manipulations and was confident enough to get to the next round. ✌️

Within an hour I got an email about the next step, I feel like, it was an automated email based on the Online Assessments Score or completion percentage because those questions had test cases implemented already to evaluate and verify the completion of the solution like Codality.

I took a week to prepare for the Phone Interview and provide my dates to Amazon (20th, 21st, 22nd, and 23rd Aug). I did not get any confirmation until 19th Aug, mentioning, that I needed to provide more dates as they didn’t find any suitable interviewer slot for those days. I again provided (23rd, 27th, 28th, 29th Aug, 3rd and 4th Sep) . I got a reply on 12th Sept that my interview is scheduled for 17th Sep.

I was a bit disappointed with the way the recruiter and candidate communication miss mismanaged. I do not understand why they were asking for the dates when they needed to decide based on their terms. Well, that is Amazon.

Phone Interview

I think they should rename the title of this interview, they called it phone interview, but it is just a normal interview with Amazon chime audio and video, God knows why they named it a phone interview 🤔.

By that time I was over-prepared and every day, solving leet code questions and refreshing my data structure, also while preparing for this I got introduced to Amazon Leadership Principle and also learned that in a 1-hour interview, 30 is reserved for questions based on Amazon principles and 30 min for technical question.

There are 14 Amazon Leadership Principles and in each interview interaction, the interviewer assigns some of the principles and asks questions based on that. Your answer should be in the STAR format.

It took hours to create a STAR response for each of the Amazon Leadership Principles from all of my work history from my career, most of them were recent and few of them were old or my previous job.

Spend equal time on problem-solving, algorithm, and data structure and on the Leadership principle STAR response(Do not underestimate it) Your interview 50% depends on it.

I prepared and practiced responses in the mirror so that I wouldn’t forget anything, because there were 14 and it was quite challenging to keep the response concise, crisp, and to the point STAR (because as developers we tend to lost in technical details). I used Google Keep to keep all my leadership principle cards always ready and handy if I forgot or mistake any thing. This really helps me to organize my thoughts.

You also need to prepare for follow-up questions of your each STAR response. This is a must for each one. A few of the follow-up questions that I got in most of the interviews were?

1. What would you have done better?
2. What would you do if you were in the same situation again?
3. What did you learn in the process?
4. How do things impact on your productivity?

In the interview, as expected 30 minutes was mostly a discussion on past work experience, and questions were based on the leadership principle like (When was the last time you took ownership or deep dive into a problem). I feel like this was an easy one 30 min.

The next 30 minutes were solving a coding problem in your preferred language of choice, that too their online editor didn’t have a compiler or test, so it was just you write the code and explain the code. I do not remember the question but it was like a medium level of leet code problem, and I had to use place sorting, along with a map to keep track of the maximum and find the desired output. I was able to do it but not in the optimized way I had almost a working solution but not the optimal one.

In this kind of interview: 1. Keep sharing your thoughts, and think out loud, while solving the problem 2. Do not sit and think, just keep talking about your approach, and your direction to solve the problem with the interview. 3. They are mostly interested in how you approach the problem and solve it, how you improve your solution, and how you think.

Before going to any interview, prepare some questions to ask at the end when you get a chance, about the company's culture, the role, their work, and role, tech stack depending on the interviewer.

Once it was finished, I was in self-doubt that there may be a chance, I would get rejected because my solution was not optimized.

And here it happened again, miss communication with the recruiter, I got an email the next day, from the Interviewer informing them that the interview hadn’t happened 🤣 I am not joking about how crazy things happening at Amazon Hiring.

I replied to them that my interview was done, you may have some misunderstanding and asked for feedback. I was like did I talk to some ghost 😁

On 26th Sep, I got an email instead of my feedback on the interview, I was asked to do the same interview again with a different person, somehow they were not able to make the decision or lost my feedback or GOD knows what happened there. I provided my availability and my next interview schedule on 7th Oct.

Phone Interview 2

1st 30 minutes was the same leadership question, STAR response, and follow-up question on those STAR responses.

Technical Question: I was asked to design a UI component to show the file system like UI on the Web, using any framework, one like below.

I used React, focus on components, recursive use of the same component, props, events and parent-child relations, and data dependencies. It's again the same coding environment, running code is not possible, just design code for components and try to use it and render it.

Amazon is such a big tech company but their hiring tools suck, I do not know why they do not build their own something like codality, stackblitz, or just partner with one of these vendors.

Well somehow, I managed to describe my idea and code in the shitty code editor and discuss my solution and approach with the interviewer in just 30 minutes, it was very little, to be honest, but somehow I managed to do it because I talk and share my idea and skip some of the codes, so I just made interviewer aware the I am skipping to move fast (This is important in all the live coding interview when you have time crunch)

On 10th Oct, I got an email that I reached the final stage of the interview and Amazon calls it the “Interview Loop” 😃

They have asked about my availability for the next 4 rounds of interviews which could happen on the same day or 2 on each consecutive day. I provided and it got scheduled on the 28th and 29th Oct. ✌️

This article is getting longer and longer, I am breaking it into two parts. Read the next part here.

Happy Reading!