Amazon Interview Experience & Questions - QAE & SDET 2012 (Chennai )

[Makeshk]

Amazon is known to be one of the top employer with highest pay. Freshers can get 7-9 lacs per annum based on their academic background and 2-3 yrs experienced can get 9-14 lacs per annum.  A best way to apply for amazon jobs is through LinkedIn. I have added an Amazon HR into my connections and followed his job posts on LinkedIn everyday.

I had applied for three different job position QAE, QAT and SDET , and got shortlisted for all three jobs. I am from testing/QA background so applied only QA related positions.

QAE & QAT:

There are seven rounds for software QAE position.

Written Test – ( Will cover the following competencies: Test Cases/Test Data/Scripting/Debugging).
Test cases Enumeration
Scripting, Debugging
QA Process
Team and Project fit
Problem Solving
Manager Round.

They had shortlisted only 25 candidates to attend the interview. Written test conducted to shortlist 10 best candidate out of 25. I was lucky enough to be one of 10 shortlisted candidates.

Test cases enumeration:
This round was quite easy, we need to derive best test cases for the given scenario. For me, the scenario was to derive test cases for a tool like picasa. There is a website (like picasa), where u can upload upto 2GB of total files size or 200 number of files for free, after the maximum limit if the user wants to upload more files he has to upgrade to premium service. Firstly, I was asked to find out types of tests that can be performed and then test cases for each type of test.
Here, there won't look at how many test cases you are deriving but the top and quality of test cases. They will have some set of top test cases, if your top five test cases are in their list then you are probably selected.

Scripting, Debugging
For QAE position, they will not expect much coding knowledge from you but also it depends on interviewer. They asked some basic programs related to array, strings and sorting.

QA Process
This is little tricker round. Some of the questions will be theoretical but most are scenario based. They asked about QA process flow in my previous company.

Problem Solving
Many are logical questions. Whatever answer you give, justify your answer is correct. In this round mostly they will look into your problem approach and solving capability, not required to arrive at answer.

Manager Round
Sometimes this round may happen, sometimes not. It depends on time. Manager will interview about your previous experience and contribution to the team. If you clear till problem solving round then you are probably selected. 

HR Round
This round is for discussion about salary 

When I attend the interview I cleared till problem solving round and got rejected in Manager/HR round. They had some cut off for each round and in problem solving round my performance was not within their limit.


SDET:
After a month of QAE interview, I got an interview call for SDET (Software Development Engineer in Test) .

I could say SDET is the toughest interview. You cannot clear each round easily as QAE. Interview will be of pure programming and few testing concepts. Time complexity and optimization is the major parameter they will look for. You can easily crack in the programs, but they will look into worst case and best case. You programs should always be in best case with less time complexity. In the interview, I wrote a program and the time complexity of my program was O(N3). They asked me to optimize my code further, I tried it somehow and reduced it to O(N2). Even that was not acceptable by the interviewer, it was still reducible he said. 

Most of the questions were asked from Crack Coding pdf. Attached with this post.

DS & algorithm:
What is a BST? Provide examples
How do you implement queue operation using two stacks
* Provided 2 scenarios asked me for which scenario my solution will be efficient?
Application haveing 80% enque and 20% deque operations possible
*Application haveing 20% enque and 80% deque operations possible
Asked,recursion? If yes, use it to implement it
Find an element in 2D matrix which is sorted row-wise and column-wise.
Find the horizontal level, which has max no. of nodes in binary tree
Given an array of numbers, you need to find numbers X & Y such that A

• + A[y] = k?
  
  PS & Coding
  Given a binary tree , asked him to return whether the tree is a BST or not
  Given a array of elements and a Number N , i asked him to return the set of pair of numbers in that array which would add up to that sum
  Given a Bar of gold , i asked to divide the bars in such a way that i could pay equally for seven days . Condition : Should use only 2 cond
  Asked him a puzzle to bring 120 using 5 0s
  Given a 2D array of dimension m X n, print it spirally
  
  Automation
  how the product is tested
  Remove dups - TDG, Char*removeDups (char*str)
  Asked, if he is aware of any testing tools. Asked him how he tested his final year project
  Asked, how do the test the web services?
  Given a account money transfer page how to automate it
  Asked about backend Dbservice
  Asked, should we directly go ahead and start writing automation. What else we have to prepare before automation
  Why automation
  Brief discussion on automation strategy followed in this project.
  Server like youtube (no upload option) how will you automate testing.

[mali]

good job guys, thanks for the post!