How I Cracked the Amazon QAE II Interview

Hello Amazon aspirants!!

I have recently cleared all interviews for the QAE II position at Amazon. I would like to share about the interview process, expectations, preparation tips and the resources I referred to during my preparation. Most of the information is already present on Web/YouTube. I am giving links to all resources here.

Note: I am not giving any questions from my interview as I have signed disclosure not to share.

About process

Before jumping into preparation, first you need to understand the hiring process.

After applying, I got a call from a recruiter. He explained me the process as below -

1. Online Assessment — Link will be shared to us, and we will have around 1 week to finish that.
2. Phone Interview — This is 1 hour round, in which questions will be asked on 3 aspects: 1. Test cases ; 2. Coding; 3. Leadership Principles (Preparation is same as explained for Main interview)
3. Main Interview — 5 different rounds — 1 hr each (Total 5hrs). Here we have option to have all rounds on same day (there will be lunch break 1hr) OR we can divide them for 2 different days

Below are those 5 rounds. Not necessarily in the same order.

Online test:

About testing process, behavioral and situation based questions. Objective type.

1. Coding

2. Test case Enumeration & Test data preparation

3. Test Planning / Strategy

4. Debugging round

5. Leadership Principles

After completion of all the above interviews, the panel will meet and decide on your candidature. Within a week, the recruiter can provide you with feedback.

Apart from this, go through the previous QA interview experiences from the Leetcode discussions section.

*Important — One of the rounds in the process is “Leadership Principles”, where you will be asked certain situational based questions which you need to answer based on the examples in your experience.

Similar leadership principles questions, 1–2 will be asked on other 4 rounds also. Around 30% of the other 4 rounds will be focussed on leadership principles questions and remaining 70% will be actual interviews about that round (Coding, Debugging, Testcases, TestPlanning).

So, Leadership Principles questions are very important when you are preparing for an Amazon interview.

Preparation:

1. Coding -

First I started preparing for the Coding round. I got a Leetcode subscription. The difference with Leetcode subscription is, we will have more questions and we will have company tag names to the coding questions.

I filtered all “Amazon” + “Easy” programs. In that, I have excluded questions related to Trees, graph related questions.

Of the remaining challenges, I started solving them daily. Most of these challenges are based on Arrays, Strings, Collections. Initially, when I had no clue on the approach, I used to see the answer on the web and tried to understand(many YouTube videos are there for each question). In that way, I have improved and could solve new problems on my own. That way I did practice around 60 easy problems from Leetcode(There are around 200+ Amazon+Easy problems in Leetcode, related to Arrays, Strings, Collections). Apart from this, I have read past Amazon QAE interview experiences on Leetcode and different websites and collected some questions(around 15) and solved them too. In Total, I have solved around 75 problems. I repeated solving them 3–4 times.

It doesn’t mean that we get interview questions from leetcode / previous questions. It only gives confidence to you to solve similar questions.

I have focussed only on basic concepts — Arrays, Stings, Collections(HashMaps mostly) related programs.

Also, refer this video -

2. Test case Enumeration & Test data preparation

Here, you may be asked to list test cases for any given scenario. Do follow the video below for the tips on how to answer. These tips are very important.

Be prepared for 1–2 questions on leadership principles (mentioned on this topic at last)

3. Test Planning & Test Strategy

Be prepared to write TestPlan / TestStrategy for any given scenario.

You may be given any scenario, and will be asked to write / explain the test plan for it. Always, ask clarifying questions.

https://www.guru99.com/how-to-create-test-strategy-document.html

Be prepared for 1–2 questions on leadership principles (mentioned on this topic at last).

4. Debugging round

In this round, you will be given an issue / bug and you will be asked to debug it. Basically, you need to explain the steps / checks you perform to isolate the issue.

This video is helpful -

There are some sample questions here.

Be prepared for 1–2 questions on leadership principles (mentioned on this topic at last).

5. Leadership Principles

This is a very important area. Amazon has 14 leadership principles.

You need to study and understand these principles. In the call with the recruiter, you will be informed if any of the 14 principles are not applicable to your role(QA). In my case, 2 are excluded. It means I need to prepare another 12 leadership principles.

You will be given any situation based question and you need to answer it based on any related example in your past. Be prepared to explain it in detail with the background of the situation, what you did, how you did and results and learnings out of it.

In many blogs and other experiences, it is recommended to have atleast 2 unique examples for each principle as the question may be repeated across the rounds and you should not repeat the same example/answer.

Below is the great website, which helped me in understanding them, and know different types of questions based on each principle with sample answers. Take that as reference and build your own answers.

https://interviewgenie.com/resources

In the above page, go to this section -

“The 16 Leadership Principles with Sample Questions and Answers That Get Results”

That’s it for now! Please let me know if you have any doubts.

Wish you all the best!!