How I Landed a Job at Amazon Luxembourg
What my process looked like and how you can do it too
Recently I received a considerable number of messages asking me how a student from a new institute and with very little guidance got a job at Amazon Luxembourg. I promised everyone that I would share my story in a blog. So here it is, my journey from Sri City to Luxembourg.
About Me
I am Krishna Kumar Dey, an SDE 1 at Amazon Luxembourg. I completed my graduation from IIIT Sri City in 2020. I was also a GSoC student developer for Chapel Language in 2019 and am currently a mentor for the same organization.
So how did a computer science student from a very new institute get a job in Amazon Luxembourg? Was it an on-campus offer? Did I get a referral?
The answer to the last two questions is “no”. Amazon did not to my campus, nor did I get a referral.
The Application Phase
I applied through the Amazon Job portal. I don’t remember the exact date, but it was in September 2019. The process was simple and included steps like resume submission, filling forms, and clicking on the submit button.
Online Assessment
After a month, I received an email from the Amazon recruitment team about next steps. Many of my friends had already done similar assessments and never heard back, so I was expecting the same. Nevertheless, I decided to take the assessment. It was divided into three parts.
Part 1, Debugging Round (20 mins): In this part of the online assessment, I was asked to find bugs in seven pieces of code.
Part 2, Coding (70 mins) and Work Style Assessment(30 mins): This part of the online assessment consisted of a coding section using Java, Python, C#, or C++. Besides the coding section, there was also a work style assessment, built around Amazon’s Leadership Principles.
Part 3, Work Simulation (150 mins): The assessment consists of a work simulation and a logical ability test. The work simulation section of the online assessment was an interactive video simulation of a day in the life of an SDE at Amazon. I was presented with various scenarios and was asked to select options for how I would respond.
After a month, I received an email stating I was shortlisted for an on-site interview in the Amazon Luxembourg office. My interview was scheduled during the 2nd week of January but was shifted to the 1st week of February thanks to the unavailability of slots.
Reason for being shortlisted
I’m not very sure about that. Doing well in all three rounds was a significant factor. My open-source contributions and internships also helped. Having good projects and leadership roles in my resume was an added advantage.
Onsite
I reached Luxembourg one day before the interview. On the day of the interview, I first met my recruiter. She gave me a tour of the whole office and told me about the process and what to expect. After 15 minutes, I was in the interview room. The interview was taken in three rounds of 45 minutes each. Two of them focused mostly on Data Structures and Algorithms and ways to optimise the initial proposed solution in terms of time and space complexities. The last one was more of an Object-Oriented Design question.
All the rounds had behavioral questions related to Amazon Leadership principles. The interviews were an excellent discussion between me and the interviewer. Initially, I was asked to solve a problem on a whiteboard and then the discussion moved on to how to optimize the solution and improve the time and space complexity.
The questions were of easy and medium level and can be practiced on LeetCode.
Offer
After the final round, I heard back from my recruiter within two business days that I had been shortlisted for the position. After another two days, she sent the offer letter.
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Preparation
I spent a lot of my time on Cracking The Coding Interview Book and LeetCode easy-medium questions. There are many other websites where you can practice questions. I solved roughly around 160 problems (95 easy, 65 medium, 10 hard) in the two weeks, covering the most common topics like Two Pointers, Binary Search, LinkedList, Trees, Graphs, DP, etc.
I took made use of many online resources and created this sheet to prepare. You can also check 14 Patterns to Ace Any Coding Interview Question. Leading up to the final round, I felt I had a good understanding of data structures and algorithms, and focused on questions Amazon had asked in the past.
Finally, I asked some of my other CS peers to simulate a technical environment. They would ask me a LeetCode problem, and I would approach it as I would a real interview. It helped me get away from an IDE and improved my interview coding. Then, we swapped and I owuld interview them. Role-playing both sides helped me understand what I could improve as an interviewee.
I also wrote about each project and kept it with myself so that I could revise before any interview. This saved a lot of time. I would also suggest getting ready with a short description of yourself to introduce to the interviewer.
For the behavioral part, I prepared contextual stories based on my experiences, following the Amazon Behavioral questions on Leadership Principles. I prepared all of my stories based on the STAR principle (Situation, Task, Action, Result).
Personal Notes and Tips
Most of the coding questions have multiple approaches. During an onsite interview, you are generally expected to propose multiple solutions and discuss the pros and cons of each approach mostly in terms of time and space complexity. Start by coming up with a brute force approach and then try optimizing it in different ways.
There is generally no restriction on the coding language to use. You can use any coding language you are comfortable with. Also, you will be expected to code on a whiteboard or paper in contrast to a standard IDE with auto-completion on a computer. Being well-versed with the syntax and all the libraries, besides their internal working and complexities, is important. A good way to develop this is by first solving a question on a notebook and then typing it for submission during your practice days.
Communication is another important point to focus on. Instead of just focussing on quietly coming up with the correct solution, try explaining all your thoughts and procedures to the interviewer. Thinking out loud is a strongly recommended practice for a coding interview. You’re marked on your thought process more than coming up directly with the right solution and this would be possible only if you’re good at communicating.
Try to test your written code by taking a dry run with sample inputs. This will give the interviewer the impression that you’re capable of detecting and debugging errors. Also, never forget to examine and correctly handle all the corner cases.
Is it necessary to also excel in competitive programming in order to get a job?
Refer to this blog by Aritra Sen: Is Competitive Programming secret to job at Google?
Key things one should do to stand out from a large number of job aspirants
- Have good projects — two to three strong projects are enough
- Open-source Contributions
- Hold some positions in college or company. Leadership qualities help to gain more attention.
- Do internships.
- Write blogs and have a link to your blog in your resume.
- Sometimes it’s good to take a referral from an existing employee of the company you apply.
Tips on your resume
- Have a decent text-based one-page template.
- Using black text and keep the font and size clean, simple, and consistent.
- Never have any typos.
- Use bullet points.
- Don’t include long lines of descriptive text. Put yourself in the place of a human resume-reviewer, who is probbaly reading dozens of resumes at a time.
- Making sure you include your contact info. Yes, this seems obvious — but make sure your name and email address are prominent. Include your Github link, or equivalent, at the top with your contact information.
- Education before experience if you’re a student or a relatively recent graduate, or experience before education (in reverse chronological order) if you’ve been in the workforce for more than a position or two.
- For recent graduates, companies insist on school, degree, major, GPA, and month and year of graduation. The further you are from college, the less college and university information you’re expected to include.
Thanks for reading!