Amazon Interview Experience | Set 432 (SDET Off – Campus)

My friend in Amazon referred me for the job . I was approached by the HR and after lots of delay (1 month), I was scheduled a Telephonic Interview.

Round 1: (Telephonic Interview ) – 1h 

A screen was shared (Notepad) where I will be writing codes and doing other rough work. I was doing conversation with him on phone.

1. Given n sized stairs and we can take 2 or 3 steps at a time. How many ways are there to climb the stairs? Question was pretty straight forward. I was able to answer quickly. Count ways to reach the n’th stair
2. Given an array with adjacent numbers differing by an absolute value of 1. A number is given and we have to search it (They do not expect the trivial linear search O(n) ). I was able to figure out the algorithm for it pretty quickly. 
3. Given a time  hh:mm format. We have the find out the bigger angle between the hour and minute hands. I took some time to figure out the formula for it and had to show the derivation of the formula to the interviewer on the screen.
4. This was a testing related question. The amazon site (some specific functionality) was working very well one day before but because of something, that functionality is slow and customers are complaining. I had to tell how will I debug this.

The interviewer was pretty impressed by my coding skills but not so much with my testing skill (I guess :P). Anyways, I got the call for my next rounds. There were four of them at Hyderabad itself. Amazon took care of all the travelling and stay (Awesome nah :D)

Round 2: (Software development Manager 1 ) : 45 mins

Asked questions like:

1. About myself and went through my CV
2. Why I am ready for testing (because my CV displayed Developer kind of profile)
3. Biggest challenge faced in my one year of job and how I fixed it.
4. Testing question: Given a web page with a text box where we can write what html component to display and it will display on the screen. I had to test this and also had to write code for one of the test cases.
5. Some new tool/technology that I have learned in very less time and applied .

Round 3: (Software development Manager 2) : 1h

Asked questions like:

1. About myself and went through my CV
2. Why I am ready for testing (because my CV displayed Developer kind of profile)
3. About my project, my role in that. That interviewer was going very deep into the tools/technologies used in it. Anyways I was able to explain well.
4. Testing question: Test an API (from one of my projects (test cases)).
5. Test whether maps are working right or not.

Round 3: (Software development Engineer) : 1h

Asked coding questions (Nailed it AF):

1. Convert a binary search tree to Greater sum tree.  Asked both recursive and iterative solutions.
2. Print a matrix in spiral order.
3. Given two arrays. One is for tasks (Processes) and each element depicts the amount of cores required to run the task. 2nd array is an array of CPU where each element depicts the no of cores in it.We have to tell how many maximum number of tasks can be allocated.  Example: Task:  [3, 5, 7], Cores: [1, 3, 5] . Here only task 0 and 1 can be allocated to CPU 1 and 2 . So, answer=2.

Round 4: (Quality Assurance Engineer) : 1h

1. Design a framework for the testing the Cart service of Amazon.  We can  Add, delete and update the elements in the cart.
2. Write unit test cases to test an add Address page in Amazon.
3. What advice as an SDET will I give to a developer and what precautions will I take.

Well, Guess what, I was not selected for the role. They were quite impressed by my coding skills and not so much with my testing skills. Fair enough !

Tips for Aspirants: Study geeks well (mostly the Data structures part and in Algo mostly the DP part). Go through other interview experience of Amazon . https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/amazon-interview-preparation/  For testing, I don’t have much idea.