American Express had visited my campus for recruiting an Engineer Trainee- Software Engineer (Technology) in August 2021. The recruitment process included 1 online test for initial shortlisting, after which 2 technical interviews and finally an HR round was held, all rounds were eliminative. The OT had 3 questions related to the Tree, the Frog Jump problem, and one more.
Out of all students who appeared in the online test only 12 students were shortlisted for technical round 1. For me it was live coding and an explanation of my projects, I got 2 questions related to Web Scraping and the interviewers asked me to show a demo of my projects. Also, I found some errors in my syntax and the interviewers allowed me to Google the error and rectify it.
Round 1: Online Test
- The recruitment process included 1 online test for initial shortlisting
Round 2: Live coding questions, with some general questions like
- Why Python over other languages(I preferred Python, so)?
- Why did you choose to do these respective projects?
- What did you learn from your last internship?
- Are you willing to switch between roles other than the one recruited for?
Round 3: Hr round
- Introduce yourself.
- Why AMEX?
- You will be given a situation and asked how will you handle things then
- I didn’t have any technical internship, so they emphasized that and asked me why not?.
- Puzzle questions.
Tips:
- Stay calm and confident: It may happen that you encounter some question which you have no idea of, or get errors while compiling it during the interview. Don’t panic, the AMEX team is very understanding and just explain to them how you can overcome that error, just be honest with the team – if you don’t know some topic, that is okay.
- Do company background research: This helped me a lot in my HR round. Go through the website, look for their vision, mission statement and try to align them in your answers. Look what technologies are they working on. Stay updated with the company’s progress.
- Don’t worry: There are many of us who couldn’t crack internships or have no experience. That is totally fine if you can justify it and prove your skills with projects or other means. Also, I had some non-tech internships abroad and in India as experience and this helped me a lot as the recruiter could see my diversity and I was also appreciated for this in the interview.
- Resume: Be very well versed with your resume. They will ask you to walk them through your resume, your skills other than the technical ones. Scholarships and achievements do make your resume stand out.
- Nervous; being nervous is okay. I actually was during my interview, and the team tried to comfort me by talking about college and life initially to make me more comfortable.
- To summarize, looking back, it was not only my skill and abilities but also good luck to have been selected for working at AMEX. The key is to keep applying because you never know when the right chord strikes between you and your dream company.