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Career Advice About Amazon

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My Meta Interview Experience (Mid-Level [E4] | USA | Reject After Follow Up)

Entry-Level Software Engineer [SDE 1] at Amazon profile pic
Entry-Level Software Engineer [SDE 1] at Amazon

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

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Posted 4 months ago
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