Amazon Senior Process Associate Interview Questions and Answers

Interview preparation tips for other job seekers - Be ready to face rejection if you are not confident in speaking.

Round: Test
Experience: The written test did NOT involve general aptitude questions. Most questions were CS specific and pertained to some kind of algorithmic analysis, design of recursive solutions, designing and tracing out an algorithm on a given sample etc. About 50-60% of the candidates were eliminated in this round.

Round: Test
Experience: The next round was a coding assignment. For those familiar with code-chef, the coding assignment was similar to a medium level problem (in the practice section) and had to be done in C. The codingassignment by design, required algorithmic optimization to execute within the prescribed time limit. About 10 candidates (8 UG and 2 PG) were selected for interviews. Yahoo generally conducts 4 technical interviews and an HR interview. Typically, 2 of the 4 tech interviews will be with immediate seniors in teams that are interested in your profile. The remaining two will be with more senior engineers (in fact, one of my interviews was with the tech director of a vertical at Yahoo). Interviewers discuss with each other after each interview, and some candidates were eliminated after one poor interview. It is therefore quite important to do

General Tips: Apart from technical skills, your communication and social skills are what can make or break an interview and eventually, decide whether or not you get the job. Objectively speaking, most candidates who make it to the final round will be very technically proficient. Therefore, your aim should be to make the decision regarding your candidature anything BUT objective. The real advantage of an interview is to let the interviewer know YOU, beyond just your written test score or your academic credentials. Interviewers like confidence in a candidate and it can even make you seem better than you really are. It will also help to have a few well thought out questions in mind for your interviewer, to show him that you have put in more effort than other candidates to find out about the kind of work going on at the company. One thing youcan do is to find out who all the interviewers are during the pre-placement talk (Yes, attending the PPT CAN BE USEFUL). General Tips Preparation Look up their LinkedIn profiles and note what projects they have worked on or guided. Asking a few insightful questions about those specific projects is a good way to create a good impression of you. It is very difficult to truly judge a candidate during a 45 minute interview, so what matters a lot is the impression left in the interviewers mind about you. If possible, try to establish a social connect during your limited interaction with the interviewers, BEFORE the interviews take place. For example, one of my interviewers, a senior tech manager at Yahoo, was an NITK alumnus. Before the interviews, I spoke to him about his experience in college. As it turns out, he was one of the founders of the web club at NITK, of which I am a member. We spoke for about 15 minutes about how the club has grown and how the club has helped its members ever since.
Skill Tips: For a computer science student who intends to take up a technical job at a tier 1 company, spend as much time as possible, honing your technical skills. Start well before placement season, if possible, in 3rd year itself
College Name: NIT SURATHKAL

Round: ONLINE CODING ROUND
Experience: Facebook visited our campus in July, 2012. We had an online coding round hosted on InterviewStreet. We were asked to solve just one problem. The given problem boils down to : Given a undirected graph, source and destination, write the code to find the total number of distinct nodes visited, considering all possible paths.
Tips: Those shortlisted had to fly to Delhi for a Personal Interview. There were four rounds of interview, each of 45 minutes. The questions were simple. But just solving the given problem wasn't enough.

There was much more interaction and short questions asked related to the problem

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: The above mentioned questions wer asked in the interview. For every solution I was asked to write the code on paper. The code should also include the implementation of the data structures used (I used heaps - so I was asked to implement heaps ). They are looking for someone with good problem solving skills and conceptually sound in data structures

College Name: BIT MESRA

Round: Resume Shortlist
Experience: You need to submit your CV and they shortlist you on this basis.Fast and accurate coding.
Tips: Clearly specify any technical achievement.

Round: Coding
Experience: You are given 4 hours to solve a few algorithmic questions.Start practicing for this from sometime earlier.
Tips: There are puzzles available on the Facebook page.

Round: Technical Interview
Experience: Three interviews. All almost exclusively technical with 1-2 HR questions.
The questions are mainly algorithmic in nature and you need to code online while talking to them.
Tips: Be as accurate and clean with your code as possible.

General Tips: Be creative while answering the questions. They might ask you questions like 'What changes would you want to make to Facebook?'.
Prepare algorithmic questions for the interviews. Most companies like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others focus on this.
Technical projects or internships will be beneficial.
Qualifying for or winning programming contests like overnite is very beneficial. Involvement in Social/Cultural activities or sports is not really essential.
Skill Tips: Being good at writing fast and correct code in any language helps a lot.
Skills: Programming
College Name: IIT KHARAGPUR

Round: CODING ROUND
Experience: In the coding round there were 3 questions to be solved in about 3 hrs.

Round: HR Interview
Experience: Expect the usual crazy questions like "Why LinkedIn?" and if you are already placed, be ready to give a proper justification for "Why LinkedIn and not XYZ?" so on. Be cool, you need not be accurate. Be well prepared with your resume and expect questions from them.
Tips: For the interview, just be confident and have a good resume ready with you.

Round: Other Interview
Experience: Coding Interview:
Simple coding questions. Make sure you first explain the logic to them and then you may be asked to write the code for it on the board using any language of your choice. Syntax is not a big deal, but don't make any logical errors. They are very friendly and may suggest certain solutions of their own. Make sure you can grasp them quickly. Find faults in your own code before they find it. Always try to give the best optimal solution. In case you are unable to do so then suggest possible improvements.

Round: Other Interview
Experience: Design Interview:
Some people may find this round a bit uneasy. But this round tests how good you are at designing solutions to problems. Most of the candidates were asked to build an online gaming system. And then they keep adding extra constraints and ideas and see if you can integrate them to your design. Database knowledge may be tested. They may also ask questions pertaining to you projects listed in your resume.

General Tips: An updated LinkedIn account with decent connections. ;)
Skill Tips: Be very strong with your coding ability. Whenever you code, do follow some standard procedures and make the code look simple and structured. Whenever you solve a coding question make sure you answer it completely for all the test cases. Partial results will only indicate that there is something wrong with the logic. Try to solve a complete question rather than multiple questions with partial results.
College Name: NIT SURATHKAL

Round: Test
Experience: Three questions of increasing difficulty level. The first one was on string manipulation, the second was based on the iterative version of the merge sort algorithm and the last one on dynamic programming.
Total Questions: 3

Round: Other Interview
Experience: Eight students were selected for this stage which consisted of three separate interviews. The first one was on algorithms and programming, the second on system design and the third was HR. In the algorithms and programming interview I was asked two questions. The interviewer asked me to first explain the proposed algorithm and then I was expected to write the code on a white board they had provided. Three weeks after the interviews the selected candidates were informed through the concerned placement coordinator.

General Tips: Don't panic, the interviewers don't expect you to come up with the optimum result directly and they will give you enough time to refine your solution.
Skill Tips: No special preparation is required. Just make sure that you have understood the fundamentals
of Data Structures and Algorithms well.
College Name: NIT SURATHKAL