How can I pass Amazon interviews? I got rejected even though I answered all questions ...

Pooya Amini

Pooya Amini

Software Engineer at Meta (Ex-Amazon/AWS)

Published May 26, 2018

This is a pretty popular question candidates ask after they get rejected in Amazon (or other tech companies) interviews. First, let's talk about what happens after an interview.

After each interview at Amazon, there is a debrief meeting in which interviewers, hiring manager, and bar raiser discuss their feedback about a candidate. Sometimes, the meeting takes few minutes or in some cases doesn't happen at all as many interviewers voted against hiring the candidate. On the other hand, there has been cases that all interviewers were positive but the final result was negative since all interviewers were concerned about a certain pattern observed during the interview. Here, I try to provide some general guidelines to help candidates sell themselves in the interview.

Technical Part

Regardless the level you were interviewed for, it's very important to write an [almost] flawless code. If your code is not working or you miss edge cases (e.g. not checking null input) it's a negative point. If you are stuck or you make a mistake, an experienced interviewer gives you a hint. It's expected that you spot the issue in your code and fix it after the hint, otherwise, it can be considered as a red flag.

Another very important part is asking clarifying questions; questions like whether the input string has only ASCII character or Unicode character or how big the input can be, etc. Clarifying questions are specifically important in system design questions. Guys, I've seen candidates who were able to write down the final code but since all the interviewers noticed the pattern of "not asking clarifying questions", we ended up not to hire him/her.

Behavioral Part

Behavioral and culture fit assessment is another significant part of the interview. We had candidates who were technically good but we spotted some red flags in the behavioral assessment. An example was for the question "What do you do if you think that you are about to miss a deadline". A SDE2 candidate responded that "I'll secretly ask my colleague to help me and I will treat him when he is behind deadline too!". Some notes to keep in mind:

  • Try to answer on your behalf. "We did this" as an answer to "What was the most challenging technical problem YOU solved?" doesn't show your contribution. Better answer is "The technical challenge was X issue which I spotted through Y investigation and took Z action to fix it".
  • Be more specific. For the question above, avoid generic answers "like I made the website up and running and it was challenging". Better answer is that there were some issues with the website like a, b, and c. I fixed them and it was challenging because blah blah blah. Also note "not knowing a technology or a programming language" is a challenge but is NOT a technical challenge. We want to understand your problem-solving skills.
  • Answer in STAR way. If you don't already know, STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, and Result. To explain a scenario try to describe the past [problematic] situation, your task to fix or mitigate the issue, the actions you took, and the final result and its quality.
  • Read Amazon Leadership Principles . Prepare some examples in your current job to show that you already have those leadership assets. Amazon takes these principles very seriously and candidate who fail to show their strength in these principles usually don't get the position even if they are technically talented. On the other side, I've seen candidates who didn't perform quite well but since they indicated strong leadership principles, we ended up hiring them arguing that technical part is easy to coach but leadership principles are not. The questions are not like "Give me an example showing that you have bias for action leadership principle" but it is going to be more descriptive like "Tell me about a time when you have worked against tight deadlines and you didn't have much time to think about all the alternatives".

Best of luck!

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