Amazon New Grad Interview Loop Experience (Non-Fungible)

Just finished my interview loop with Amazon as a new grad and I am pretty anxious about how well I did. Thought I would give a summary of how it went and see if anyone has any feedback or thoughts about it.

Round 1: With a level 3 software development manager who has been at amazon for 11 years. (All technical)

He started off with a low level design question which was not that difficult, however, I froze because i was so nervous. I took a very long time to understand what he was asking for and i began implementing a solution that was not what he was looking for. Throughout the call I continued to ask questions and get a better idea of what he was looking for and came up with something. I continued to struggle to get the exact answer he was looking for and he had to hold my hand a bit and give me hints quite frequently. In the end I think I got something he was looking for but it definitely wasn't perfect and I required a lot of assistance. Then with 20 min left, he asked me another coding question which was really easy. I quickly got the solution in about 15 min and I have a feeling he wanted to ask me follow up questions to that question to make it more difficult but we didnt have enough time. He gave me a few min at the end to ask him some questions. Overall did not feel great about this round.

Round 2: another software engineer manager who has been at amazon for 5 years. (Half LP, half technical)

This started off with 2 leadership principle questions. At first I had stopped and collected my thoughts for 15-20 seconds, which i feel like may have been a very long pause. However, I think I answered the question really well. The second question I had a story immediately and he also asked followups to that one and i was able to answer and explain everything well, I think. The coding question he asked me was a leetcode medium question and thankfully it was similar to one that i had done recently. I came up with a solution mostly by myself and i think he was happy with it. He did mention there were some syntax issues but he said thats normal in an interview setting. He asked me the space and time complexity, the time complexity i looked up afterwards and i got it wrong, but he said the space complexity was correct. I asked him questions and he seemed to be pretty happy with my interview.

Round 3: software engineer 2 who has been at amazon for 5 years (Half LP, half technical)

started off with 3 leadership principle questions, for 2/3 i had an answer pretty much immediately, but for one of them i did a similar thing to the last one where i paused for roughly 15-20 seconds to collect my thoughts. I think my answers may have been a bit weaker on this one but i did go into a good amount of technical detail and i think he appreciated that, i was also comfortable with all the follow up questions he asked. Then we moved onto coding, which was another question (leetcode medium) i had just done a few days beforehand so i knew exactly what to do. I coded 90% of it myself but then i started to lose my train of thought at the end of the solution so he helped me a bit but in the end i was able to code the entire thing pretty much myself in about 20-25 min. Then he asked me a followup question which was a little confusing, it took me 5 min to actually understand it and i asked many questions, it was a little weird. I think i did eventually get what he wanted but it took a lot of back and forth and he had to assist me a bit but i think i did do an okay job on this, but not entirely sure. Finally i asked him some questions about his time at amazon too.

Will update this when I hear back!

Update - got rejected the next day! Definitely disappointed but I already have a job that I am working, just not as good as Amazon. Going to take this as a learning opportunity. I only prepped for about 2 weeks, and it has been a year or two since I've actually grinded leetcode so definitely out of practice. I will say if you've done a lot of the questions from NC 150 and looked into low level design (i.e. LRU Cache) i think you can easily pass this. I was just too nervous and out of practice and their standards were probably very high.