Amazon New Grad Software Engineer Interview Experience — AWS Offer After Four Onsite Rounds

Timeline:

July 24: HR reached out on LinkedIn; I applied.
July 31: OA.
August 24: Survey.
September 4: BOS onsite.
September 10: Verbal offer.

Four back-to-back onsite rounds.

First round

The interviewer asked two behavioral questions: one about doing something outside my area of responsibility, and one about helping a peer who was struggling.

The coding question was similar to LeetCode 1152, but seemed a little easier: I only had to consider consecutive logs.

Second round

The bar raiser pressed hard on three Dive Deep questions and one about critical feedback, then left ten-plus minutes for my questions.

Third round

There was an interviewer and a shadow interviewer. The behavioral questions included a tight deadline and a time I hadn't finished by the deadline.

Thirty minutes for two coding problems: Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters and Word Search II. Both were exactly the standard problems.

Fourth round

The hiring manager asked GenAI-related questions and wanted detailed examples, including examples of mistakes.

The coding question was to design a rate limiter. The prompt was vague and provided nothing; I had to clarify everything myself. After asking my questions, I used a deque for a sliding window. The interviewer kept asking what could replace the deque, and I couldn't answer. There were some other follow-ups too.

I originally thought my poor answers to the follow-ups in this round would be a problem, but they didn't seem to have much impact.