Career Advice About Amazon

I have my 1:1 catch up call scheduled with my manager soon, this is the first 1:1 / call I'll be having with him since I met him in the interview. What are some of the good questions I can ask w.r.t to the team and the work that I'll be doing? He had taken my System Design interview and there he went on to talk about the team for 15 mins where we discussed about the team work, team size, on call structure, wlb etc. One important point which I feel is that I won't be joining the team immediately, there's still 3 months time.

Hey everyone!

I just passed all my Meta interviews for E4 in infra! and now I am onto team matching!
However, my recruiter wants me to try out for the monetization/ads org, but I've heard a lot of bad rumors about that org, notably that work life balance is awful and stress is really high. (Blind seems to especially dislike it haha)

Does anyone have real experience with that org here? Are the rumors true?

I don't mind a little bit of extra stress and doing some overtime from time to time as long as it's not overtaking my personal life.
For instance at Amazon (Gen AI) there were months where I was doing 80h+ per week non stop and that's the number one reason why I would like to leave tbh.

This is only the fast track option that my recruiter is offering me tho, I might still be able to get into the normal team matching pipeline afterwards too.

Anyways, thanks in advance! :)

As I think about my career a few years from now, I wonder if I will continue to learn and grow at Amazon or if it would make sense for me to switch to a startup. I do care about compensation as well so that may be a limiting factor in jumping to a startup. What advice do you have for someone who may be interested in working at a startup vs. Big Tech? How many years of experience should I rack up at Amazon / in Big Tech before moving to a startup?

Preparation: Standard top 100 LC problems + Infra System Design Problems + Behavioral problems (STAR)

Interviews

Meta phone screen: Asked two questions directly from the top 50 LC tagged (Array Sum and Tree BFS categories). Aced both questions and was notified the next day that I had moved on to onsite.

Onsite prep: This would be my first system design interview and I didn't want to mess it up. I booked multiple mocks and though they weren't cheap, I was satisfied with the overall quality, feedback, and accurate grading.

Meta onsite 1 (coding): This round tripped me up and I was disappointed given how much I had prepared 🙁

• First question: (got optimal runtime, but not optimal space)
• Second question: Multiple binary searches on an array (did not get the optimal solution, couldn't find a question to tag)
• Immediately after the round, I realized my mistakes on both questions but couldn't go back and change it 🙁

Meta onsite 2 (behavioral): No surprise questions and I answered them to the best of my capacity stressing my ability to work with other people specifically

Meta onsite 3 (system design): The question is similar to

• I had trouble understanding the interviewer and threw all my system design knowledge out there. There wasn't much discussion but I did mention concepts such as inverted index, sharding, replication, hot partitions, cache invalidations

Meta onsite 4 (coding)

• This was my strongest performance and I was proud of myself after this round. I solved both questions optimally
  • Question 1: (LC Hard)
  • Question 2:
• Surprisingly (given my other rounds) I received a call the next day saying that they wanted to give me a follow-up coding round

Meta onsite 5 (follow-up coding)

• I fumbled this round, which was especially heartbreaking. The questions were related to Palindrome (LC Hard) and Grid DFS
• Same day I was notified that I was rejected 🙁

Eye-opening experience overall and I know I have much more work to pass next time around. Total time: ~1.5 months

I was recently laid off from AWS. I see few open roles for SDE-1s but descent number for SDE-2 roles.

Should I study system design and apply for SDE-2 roles or focus on SDE-1 roles?

I have not studied for system design interviews. I estimate that I will need 2-3 months of studying before I can pass the interviews. My YOE is low for SDE2 and I might be wasting my time applying for SDE2.

Here is a breakdown of my experience:

• SDE-1 at AWS: 1 year 9 months (not including 2 months for WARN)
• SDE intern at NASA JPL: 1 year
• Undergraduate Researcher: 3 years. Co-author on 3 papers. First-author on 1 paper. All reputable journals.

My manager at AWS was telling me that I should apply for promo in the next few months (after finishing a project). I got laid off before I could apply.

Is there anything I can do now to make me stand out as an SDE2? For example, contributing to open source. I want to try being an entreprenuer but I know few ventures make more money than working at FAANG so maybe it's not a good idea.

I'm new to the team, and I want to make an impact quickly. How can I quickly gain respect of people on the team? Are there certain things I should do as I act/react to other people?

Definitions:

Backend: Distributed Systems, scalable applications, fault tolerant systems, control plane applications, API development, uses higher-level languages like Java/Python.

Low-Level: Database Internals (Query Optimization, Transaction processing, Data/Storage engines), Compilers, GPUs, latency sensitive software, accelerators. Usually C/C++.

Which is better for long-term career growth and compensation?

Hi all. I got laid off in April from Amazon. I have been looking for a job since then but I am a junior engineer and I haven't been able to get an offer. Someone at Taro suggested that I fill the gap by claiming that I was working on my own startup. This could get me to the mid-level bar.

I thought about doing some personal projects and claiming that I was trying to monetize them but failed. I am concerned that recruiters and hiring managers are going to see right through that though. Side projects are ideally done on the side of my full-time job.

What are some ways that I can fill the employment gap and get to the mid-level before I secure a full time job?

I'm currently a mid-level engineer, and I've already made a good amount of progress towards senior. However, I'm looking to change teams as I don't like the work too much on my current team, and I want to minimize the progress "loss" as much as possible in my new team by finding one that sets me up well for the mid-level -> senior promotion.

What’s a good team composition for this? Do you just want a good mix of all levels? What other factors besides team composition should I look for when it comes to evaluating a team on this axis?

I want to know if I'm ready to start interviewing. Here's some additional context:

• I'm confident with easy and easy-medium questions, 50-50 with normal-mediums, and I'm having tough time with harder-mediums and hards.
• I can identify and apply most patterns but the topics I struggle with are heaps, bit manipulation (python sucks here), backtracking, and dynamic programming.
• I'm more confident with System Design than LeetCode due to professional experience. I also studied through 4 use-cases in Grokking the System Design for practice.
• I've done 217 Leetcode questions total in the span of 1 year. Of those, 100 new questions were done in the past 6 months. I also re-do questions using spaced repetition in a Notion table with ToDo,
• For recruiter phone-screens I kinda struggle to explain what I do in my role since I do a little bit of everything. I need to work on a concrete explanation.

There were some great tips on this question, that was previously asked. Our team is pretty good at steps 1 & 2 that Alex mentions regarding setting an agenda and sending the invite beforehand. However, the team really struggles to make sure the meeting agenda is achieved. We have a lot of great discussions but they are not related to the objective of the meeting. How can we bring the discussion back to the main agenda without being rude and cutting potentially important tangents?

I have just joined a new team, and have my first coding task. I am currently terrified about taking the first step and writing some code and testing it.

I have spent a lot of time researching solutions, but have found myself bit in the past because of a lack of testing and research, and also am just terrified of breaking things.

What are some suggestions for getting over this fear, and how can I be more confident that the testing and implementation cover all edge cases and won't have bugs?

I am joining Amazon soon as SDE 2. At my previous job, I was a higher end SDE1. I have owned small internal services at my previous job. I would like to know what are some of the things that can be expected from me as SDE 2 @ Amazon ? I am expecting more ownership, but is that the only thing? I did ask the same question to my manager but he seemed very chill about it and said that he cannot say anything at the moment, maybe in our 1:1s we can discuss more clearly. Also, if you can let me know how the expectations vary across levels for Junior and Mid level and what can I do to hit the ground running and create a good impression from the very start, that'd be great. I am sure that you must have seen various E3 / E4s at Meta. If you can relate to what exactly was the difference that you saw, that'll be super helpful.

I’m an electronics and communications engineer, I’ve been working in low-level software and hardware. I want to understand other domains – other technical teams and also dipping into PM strategy. I think this is limiting my growth in Amazon.

I see many experienced developers finding flaws in the existing architecture and also refactoring them to make it much better. I don't think I have yet gained the ability to identify loop holes in complex projects. However, I am able to fix issues if someone else calls them out pretty quickly.

How can I improve on this? What are some good resources to develop this skill?

Starting my first day and I was assigned an onboarding buddy. I was wondering what are some of the main questions I should ask.

Some questions I have asked:

1. Wiki on how to set up dev environment
2. Info about all meetings that I was invited to
3. More info about what our team does?

I'm wondering if there are any other main ones I should be asking or is it just ask as they come along?

When working on a new task, I often find myself asked to estimate how long a task may take. Luckily, my team is pretty forgiving, but a critical step will be to start more accurately estimating tasks.

How do you get better at breaking down tasks to understand what needs to get done, and then giving proper estimations for how long those tasks will take?