Sharing application process timeline/details to help others with an interview coming up.
1/14/2025- Applied with referral
2/5/2025- Received an OA link. Completed OA and work simulation within 2 days. First OA problem: LC easy/medium, passed all test cases. Second OA Problem: LC Hard, passed most test cases, but failed to submit optimal solution. Realized way too late it was a stack problem, and didn't have enough time to handle edge cases. Commented out what progress I made and submitted with brute force solution. Work simulation: behavioral decision making/data analysis. Study leadership principles and use best judgement.
5/29/2025- Received a link to provide interview availability dates.
6/12/2025- Interview scheduled for 6/24/2025.
6/24/2025- Format: 3x1 hour interviews with 30 minute break between 2nd and 3rd interview.
Round 1: Solve 2 LC Mediums. First question was on linked lists, second question was intervals/binary search. Was able to write a working solution to both problems. I had the correct approach to solving the first problem, but made some silly mistakes when writing code. Interviewer brought up the mistakes, and I explained how I would fix them. Overall, interviewer was happy with my solution. Moved on to the second problem, which was much wordier. Thoroughly clarified the problem statement and my approach before coding. Interviewer confirmed my solution was correct, but I had to write some messy code towards the end because we ran out of time. Felt good about my problem solving, but left this round feeling shaky because of the time crunch. Interviewer was neutral, but did provide positive feedback whenever I gave the right approach to a problem or identified edge cases on my own.
Round 2: Bar raiser round with a senior manager without a software development background. Answered standard behavioral questions with several detailed follow-ups. Interviewer was very nice and helped me feel at ease. I rambled for some of my stories, and wasn't as concise as I could have been. When I asked for feedback at the end of the interview, the interviewer said I did excellent and he could tell I owned all the projects I described. Felt super confident after this round.
Round 3: 30 minutes of technical deep dive about my past internship projects+30 minutes of Low-Level Design (LLD) on designing an Amazon Locker. Thought I did well on the technical deep-dive, and interviewer seemed happy with my LLD solution. I clarified the system requirements at the beginning, identified key entities, and outlined relationships between entities before coding up a solution. Explained my thought process the entire time, and explained how I would implement things differently if I had more time/the system was more complex. When I asked for feedback at the end of the interview, the interviewer said I had really detailed explanations, but went into too much depth explaining certain topics, and could have let him guide the conversation more. Overall, however, he said I did a great job. Feedback was definitely fair, also felt good after this round.
7/3/2025: Received an email saying that I passed the interview, but the role that I applied for is filled, so the recruiting team needs to find another match before extending an offer (inclined to hire).
7/15/2025: Offer extended
Note: The exact wording of the outcome email was "While you have successfully passed the interview process, we are not yet able to move forward with an offer at this time. This delay is not a reflection of you or our belief in your potential for success at Amazon." The person who referred me was an SDM, so I asked him what this meant, because I initially thought I had been rejected. He explained what most likely happened is that at some point in the interview cycle, a hiring manager had shown interest in my application, but at the last moment, due to some circumstance (such as a reorg, budget slash, hiring another candidate), they had been unable to bring me on to their team. However, since I had passed the interview, Amazon still wanted to hire me. He told me not to worry, and that I would most likely get an offer letter in a couple of days/weeks/months once recruiting matched me with another hiring manager, barring a company-wide hiring freeze.
Reflection: Felt good about the process. Made some mistakes, as expected, but interviewers generally provided positive feedback. For DSA prep, did most problems in NeetCode 150 and Amazon tagged within past 30 days on LeetCode. Both DSA questions in the final round were directly from these sources. For LLD, used awesome-low-level-design. For LP questions, I studied this blog post and wrote detailed reflections about my 5-6 strongest projects/leadership stories in a Google doc the week before the interview. General comment about Amazon recruiting: they move really slow, but are responsive to emails. Going to update if/when I get an offer letter.
