Amazon FEE II Interview (Seattle)

Just want to share my experience interviewing for a Front End Engineer (FEE) II role at Amazon.

Online assessment:

Based on the email it said it was going to be a DSA problem - which it was not. So I don't know if that was an error or what but it caught me off guard. Had 2 UI problems in vanilla JS/HTML/CSS - one was building an accordion and the other was a file explorer.

Phone screen with hiring/engineering manager:

(2 Leadership Principle (LP) questions + technical) After being caught off guard from the initial round, I spoke to the recruiter and they assured me the phone screen would be front end focused. Again, I was caught off guard. I was given a blank/basic text editor and the manager told me to pick a function such as debounce, or priority queue (gave a couple other options i can't remember) and write them up. I went with priority queue. I suppose this could be considered front end (??) but I was not expecting it. It involved writing a function class/constructor. Anyways the manager was very kind as I struggled through it and asked how I would execute things and take them off the stack and so forth. Once he saw that I could think through some various logic he called it and we ended early. I thought I failed for sure.

Final round:

• 5 X 1 hour interviews
• 4 of them were LP questions followed by technical (was told it would be 2 LP questions per technical interview but it was really between 2-5)
• 1 was all LPs
• Technical interviews were the following:

1. DSA problem - this exact problem https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/2480853/amazon-front-end-engineer-seattle-phone-n600q/ The posted solution is not exactly right. But its a DFS graph traversal problem.
2. Javascript function - had to write out JSON.stringify from scratch. It's a recursive problem with a couple tricky catches. GreatFrontEnd has this problem and all the related JS function problems under their Amazon guide. I highly recommend that site.
3. System design - basically asked the Cart aspect of an ecommerce shopping cart. I also recommend GreatFrontEnd for their system design study guide.
4. Frontend UI - Had to code up an image carousel. I had read mixed reviews about whether they wanted you to work in vanilla JS or react. I prepared for both and then asked what the interviewer preferred, which was react.

For all of them you are coding in basically a text editor - not a big focus on sytax or remembering helper functions you can easily look up. For the most part they just want to make sure your logic makes sense.

My outcome

Every technical question I got I had done in my prep, so I solved everything. So I thought I would get the offer, but I didn't. I think they wanted someone with more experience (I only have a year and change with a company and some freelance experience). They said that I passed for a level 1 role and am offer-eligible. But they have no FEE 1 roles available so I'm out of luck. Best of luck to y'all.