If you are fresh out of college, Amazon can be a great place to pick up loads of skills. You wind up (mostly) managing your own projects end to end, so you wind up learning about build, deployment, system administration, schema design, as well as any coding required for the task. You also learn about scalability. And of course, you get to work with lots of cool distributed technologies. There's something to be said for having software that runs on hundreds of servers. There are a few nice perks as well, such as a free bus pass and occasional keggers. The environment is pretty relaxed in that you don't have to dress up or watch what you say.
You get a pager pretty shortly after starting and are expected to respond to it at all hours. Management expects everyone to work crazy hours and thinks nothing of asking you to work weekends, nights, or even cancel your vacation to support a project launch.
Cooperation between teams is nearly non-existent, and you will often wind up implementing necessary features yourself. Due to political wrangling, you can wind up taking on responsibilities far outside of your realm, like taking over QA's job for a spell.
You are expected to provide frontline support for the databases despite your level of database knowledge. Unless you are really lucky or really senior, expect to spend < 25% of your time actually writing software; most of your time is spent troubleshooting or triaging emergencies.
I would advise they focus more on quality and stability for a time rather than forcing releases out the door.
The first question in the technical interview section was simple. As I solved it, they added more and more layers of complexity. I got it correct, but maybe my solution was suboptimal because I did not make it to the next interview round.
1. Online Assessment Interview Invite to schedule. 2. Hiring Manager Round 2/3 LPs and 2 LeetCode medium problems. 3. Interview with SDE II Half an hour with LPs, and the other half doing a coding question to write maintainable code. 4. Bar Rai
I was intensely grilled about Leadership Principles and my resume combined. I was also given a LeetCode Medium question focusing on API Design and Implementation. I was given time to ask questions back to the interviewer.
The first question in the technical interview section was simple. As I solved it, they added more and more layers of complexity. I got it correct, but maybe my solution was suboptimal because I did not make it to the next interview round.
1. Online Assessment Interview Invite to schedule. 2. Hiring Manager Round 2/3 LPs and 2 LeetCode medium problems. 3. Interview with SDE II Half an hour with LPs, and the other half doing a coding question to write maintainable code. 4. Bar Rai
I was intensely grilled about Leadership Principles and my resume combined. I was also given a LeetCode Medium question focusing on API Design and Implementation. I was given time to ask questions back to the interviewer.