Amazon Interview Experience for Devops/Support Engineer (5 Years Experienced)

Applied through Referral for Bangalore location. All rounds happened over amazon chime(virtually) due to covid-19. The entire process took 2months-1month to get a call and then next month interviews+offer rollout. Was interviewed in December 2020.

Round 1(Hiring Manager round): Supposed to be second round but was rescheduled. Brief introduction followed by behavioral questions(on leadership principles.

1. Tell me a situation where you had to convince your client and how did you persuade him to agree to you.
2. What do you think of operational excellence?
3. What would you do if the delivery cannot be done before the deadline due to incomplete features?
4. Tell me a situation where you had a conflict of interests with your co-worker and how you dealt with it
5. Tell me of a situation where you achieved a way beyond your bar. How you can improve that task further?

And few more scenario-based questions.

Tip for this Round: Don’t bluff. Relate each leadership principle to your past work and answer. Think of how your work could impact the company/customer and answer from that perspective. Only if you have really worked/shown those leadership principles in the past, you can crack this round.

Round 2 (Mostly on Linux fundamentals): Brief introduction followed by a question on one of my previous tasks

1. Explain your latest automation. Entire task and how you contributed to it from scratch.
2. How can you improve that automation now?
3. Few Linux questions-processing a log file and fetching for few error codes from debugging prints. Can be solved using cat and sed.
4. Write a shell script for tasks performed in (c) —> I wrote a simple for loop command. The interviewer was impressed.
5. Discussion on how to debug disk space issue in Linux
6. Write a shell script to generate a report on 10 top space-consuming workspaces (folders) with consumption details—> again a simple for loop with df & du commands.

Round 3 (Python coding- Any language you can choose): Brief introduction followed by questions

Array of numbers could be either in increasing order or decreasing order or increasing then decreasing order or vice-versa. Print the type of array based on this order.

Example-if array is [1,2,3,4,3,2,1] output should be 
"increasing-decreasing"
Expected time complexity-O(1)

Solution: Compare first and second elements. The same way compares the last 2 numbers in an array. Then decide what type of array it is based on these 2 results.

Few leadership questions like what were previous achievements and how it impacted business etc.

Round 4 (Debugging Round Mostly on Linux): Brief introduction followed by questions

Questions on file processing, solutions involved a cat, sed, awk, tail, head, grep -B, sort, unique, etc

How would you debug if there is an issue with API output -> Discuss all the scenarios ranging from network connectivity to data in DB from where API fetches its data.

Round 5 (Bar Raiser round): Final round which will be scheduled only if you clear the previous 4 rounds. Brief introduction followed by following behavioral questions

How have you dealt with ambiguous data in your tasks.

Failure in your task and what you have learned out of it. How can you improve it now

Task where u showed your ownership and how you could have improved in your WoW now.

A Task where you improved the lives of your colleagues/team

And few more behavioral questions which were similar to what was asked in the hiring manager round(Both of them were stressing different leadership principles)

By God’s grace, next day got a call from the recruiter that I am selected and package negotiation had started. Within a week, the offer was rolled out. 

Tip for Amazon interview: Each round is based on 2-3 Leadership principles, and you are expected to raise the bar in a few of them. They will not ask on what technology you have worked for but any behavioral question should be answered technically highlighting how efficiently you have contributed to the team/customer. Be ready to explain how you have crossed your responsibilities to work across teams for your tasks. You cannot bluff. You cannot crack if you don’t have those 14 leadership principles(at least a few of them). Your programming question also will be actually evaluated against any of the leadership principles, so don’t concentrate on getting the solution but how efficiently you arrive at the optimized solution. And speak throughout the interview.

I hope this helps the reader and pray that God bless you with your interview at Amazon.