There is hardly any interview experience for SDE-2 frontend profile at Amazon, So, I felt it as my responsibility to write this one. I hope it will give you a glimpse of it and help you.
I have 3+ years of experience in frontend development. I got a call through referral program in September from Amazon Hyderabad. The interview process was as below –
Round 1 (Online Test – Time: 2 hrs ) –10 MCQ questions on HTML, JS and CSS. 1 Machine coding question – Make an image carousel in vanilla JS. **Googling is allowed**
Round 2 (F2F Technical – Time: 1 hr) – 15-20 minutes – behavioral assessment (2 or 3 behavioral questions). Remaining time – On a shared text editor (https://livecode.com/), asked to make a 5 star rating component using JS, HTML and CSS
Round 3 (F2F Technical – Time: 1 hr) – 15-20 minutes – behavioral assessment (2 or 3 behavioral questions)
Remaining time – On a shared drawing tool (https://www.invisionapp.com/), asked to design a frontend system for a newspaper site’s home page. The area to work upon are –
- The design and components of the home page.
- How to make it mobile friendly? (Ans: PWA)
- How to make the rendering faster? (Ans: Use of caching, service workers)
- How to make it highly available in case of heavy load? (Ans: Use of multiple servers)
Make sure you study about all the caching mechanisms and good system design practices.
Refer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXRr9fGCBRM
Round 4 (F2F Technical – Time: 1 hr) – 15-20 minutes – behavioral assessment (2 or 3 behavioral questions). Remaining time – On a shared text editor (https://livecode.com/), asked to make a component similar to Whatsapp’s last seen. Provided the date, it should show one of the following message-
- last seen just now
- last seen a minute ago
- last seen an hour ago
- last seen a month ago
- last seen an year ago
Other requirements – Udpate message dynamically according to the current time. After my implementation, we spent rest of the time optimizing it.
Round 5 (F2F Technical – Time: 1.5 hr) – 30 minutes – behavioral assessment (2 or 3 behavioral questions)
- Remaining time – On a shared text editor (https://livecode.com/), asked to implement a social network system for an organization.
- Working – The system would allow an employee to log into the application and see all the employees list. Employees can chat with each other if they are friends.
- Problem statement – To make someone your friend, you need to have at least one mutual friend. So, a user should be shown the list of minimum employees he/she would have to be friends with to finally make someone his/her friend.
- I told them about finding the shortest path to reach from A to B (did a brute force recursion). After that, he asked me to implement the whole code in HTML and JS. Then a discussion on optimizing the implementation/data-fetching carried on.
Verdict – Not selected
Tip – Prepare behavioral questions as many as possible.