Background

Amazon employs thousands of workers across its warehouses and corporate offices across the globe. The job that Amazon provides start from hourly and span across part time to full time jobs. The payment that Amazon provides to its employees for working from home is as mentioned below. The payment is much higher than many other organizations and the overall country average. The payment provided by Amazon is extremely competitive and also brings with it a number of employee benefits and perks like retirement plans, paid holidays, and vacations. Candidates are always looking forward to join Amazon and avail these benefits along with good compensation.

Working from home provides multiple people an opportunity to work for Amazon in a variety of roles, like administrative, software engineering, project management, solution architect, and customer service. Working at home provides benefits like saving cost and expenses on gas prices, travel expenses and outside food costs. This facility is incredibly attractive opportunity for candidates who are aiming to work for Amazon. However, there are a variety of pros and cons that have been shared by Amazon employees when they work in the different roles at Amazon. It has been found by different reports that time off task or TOT, which is a metric by Amazon to identify the employee performances, was designed to identify impediments that a worker may face.

Read more: What months does Amazon hire? »

Amazon Pays and Employee Stress

Amazon initially wanted and explained that they do not want people working with the mindset of risking their job security or losing their employment. The time off task metric which measures how long an employee talks or is talking to a co worker or is lacking in productivity was created with the purpose of making associates more productive and being successful. Many employees have reported that they found the system to be fair, and it tracks productivity of associates accurately. Employees have highlighted that if they go to the workplace and do the right things and follows all the protocols that the management wants them to, they will not get into any trouble.

Hence, the automated technologies that Amazon uses to track its employees works fine to a great extent and does not contribute to substantial work stress in majority of the scenarios. Amazon pays its employees considerably well, even for employees who are working from home. One of the most important aspects which Amazon uses to make sure that the quality of its candidates are fairly high is the bar raiser round. The task of the bar raiser is to maintain good quality of candidates during all the hiring interviews at Amazon. The bar raiser round has a specific task that is included in their particular training program. The bar raiser round helps ensure that the candidate which is being hired is better than 50% of the existing candidates in Amazon.

Amazon Bar Raiser Round Tips

The bar raiser helps to ensure that the quality of the candidates who are being hired at Amazon is never falling short of the expected quality. Thus the bar raiser round at Amazon helps in selecting only deserving engineers. The bar raiser interview team is created with third party employees who are not associated directly with Amazon. They are a team who is not related with the team that you are interviewing for. The bar raiser employees interview the candidates on a specific set of criteria on which they are trained to ask. The bar raiser round also has the ability to reject a candidate if they find them not to be fit for the role that they have applied. It is important to pay close attention to the types of the question that the bar raiser interviewer can ask.

The best thing that you can do while interviewing at Amazon is to prepare well for all the interview rounds equally importantly. The work at home pay is very good for Amazon for most of the roles, hence it makes sense to prepare and practice extensively before you appear for the bar raiser round. The Amazon interview process is extremely rigorous. The technical interview for the different types of work from home roles consist of at least three rounds for positions across the junior development to management. The pay is very good for Amazon work from home employees and there is a considerable preparation strategy which is required for candidates to prepare for the interview rounds.

Amazon Work from Home Preparation

The interview for candidates at Amazon starts with the initial phone screen, which includes about 20 to 30 minutes of conversation regarding your background and experience with the technical recruiter. It is important to fully update your LinkedIn profile and your traditional resume before you apply for Amazon and attend the initial phone screening round. The initial phone screen round helps make sure that you are a good fit for this opening before moving on to the next roles and interview panels. The recruiters who are tasked to interview the candidates in this particular round helps to understand if you are a particularly good fit for the role. This is because there are hundreds of candidates who are competing for the same role that we have applied for.

The recruiter needs to understand that you are a potential candidate whose experience match considerably with the requirements and eligibility skill set for this open role. In the next round there will be a coding assignment, which particularly involves solving about one to two coding types of problems along with algorithms and data structures. Subscribe above to get a complete understanding of the types of questions that you can expect in your Amazon interview.There is a very good payment that is provided by Amazon for these work from home types of roles. The coding assignment is not easy and takes a lot of preparation before the actual day. It is important to revise some of the key programming languages and skills that you have learned earlier.

Amazon Interview Guidance

Python and Java continue to be the most important languages along with questions from algorithms and data structures. The coding problems and solutions that you are going to find above after you subscribe will give you a comprehensive understanding of the types of questions you will be asked. There is no exact, accurate and right answer often and the recruiter at Amazon wants to know your thought process. The ability of your analytical thinking and logical skills is what the Amazon interviewer wants to see. The recruiter assesses your approach and wants to understand your thought process and how you can look at a problem from a variety of angles. The coding assignment at Amazon is limited by a specific time duration during which you will have to solve the questions.

The coding interview is often taken in a shared document or screen and in a coding interview platform. This helps ensure that when you are typing the code at the same time the interviewer can see what exactly you are typing. The interviewer might then ask you to walk through the code while you are typing so that they can get a feel of your thought process while you are working on it. The interviewer might ask you different types of questions based on the code that you are writing to help understand why you did something and if it can be done in a better way. These steps ensure that you are fully talking and explaining to the interviewer and not only writing the code and you're hoping it gives an accurate result.

Amazon Coding Questions

The code that you will be writing during the coding assignments might not be exactly accurate and executable. But if the code that you're writing has a high degree of flexibility and scalability, and at the same time is focused with the right logic, then the interviewer will be happy with your code. The next round of the Amazon interview is the on site interview which is often considered as the final round. The Amazon onsite interview consists of about three to four rounds which depends on the type of the role that you have applied for and the seniority of the position. There are a variety of managerial interviews which are taken at Amazon which focus mostly on the systems design and behavioral rounds, while some of the junior positions at Amazon are more emphasized on data structures and coding with the most optimized algorithms.

It is important to note that the Amazon on site interviews often consists of a coding round, a design round, and also a behavioral round where the interview parents will be asking a variety of questions to understand our candidate from all perspectives. Each of these interview rounds can last about 30 minutes and often up to one hour. The interview panels at Amazon consists of members from diverse backgrounds who evaluate a candidate from different perspectives and also on that particular role for which they have applied. The interview panel consists of members from the team that the candidate will be working with in the future. The Amazon interview panel might also consists of different managerial positions and roles who want to see how the candidate performs.

Sorting, Trees, Linked List, Stack, and Queue

Working from home for an Amazon role is a very lucky opportunity for many candidates because it saves a lot of money in travel and food expenses. The Amazon pay for work from home is considered very generous and is one of the most competitive in the industry. There are a variety of topics which the Amazon interview requires you to cover and be ready for to be asked during the interview. Some of the questions which are asked commonly during the Amazon interview round is the sorting algorithm type of questions. The Amazon interviewer might also be interested in asking you regarding recursions and backtracking type of problems, and also string problems. There are a variety of types of string related problems which you need to be prepared for during the Amazon interview.

There are different types of trees and tree variants which is important for data structure related type of questions for the Amazon interview. Questions on linked lists, stacks and queues are very common in the Amazon interview process. There are greedy algorithm questions and also various types of graph related questions which a candidate must be ready for while appearing for a coding interview for Amazon. Dynamic Programming is another concept which candidates are expected to be aware of before appearing for the Amazon interview. The next round in the Amazon interview can be of the design round, which is consisting of the system design and the product design round. In these rounds, the interviewer will present you with variety of scenarios and wants to see your thinking process.

Amazon Product Design Interview

The interviewer wants to see how you would build a product in a scalable and efficient way. There are a variety of perspectives and scenarios to consider while owning a product and building it for billions of people. The interviewer would want to see how you handle issues like latency and security while building a product. You might not get extremely technical about the technologies to be used while explaining your perspectives. However, it is important to show that you understand the problems and can implement them effectively if you have the right tools and experts in the place. Some of the common types of things that you are expected to know and give inputs on are object modeling and API design, along with concurrency and scalability.

These are the types of things that would give a comprehensive exposure and answer to product design type of questions. Product designing is one of the key aspects of Amazon because it uses hundreds of different teams to build an excellent product. The customer experience must be of extremely high quality because customer satisfaction is one of the key parameters for Amazon. Any of the services and products that are used by Amazon customers should be of the highest quality. Your answer should be focused on the customer satisfaction and experience that your ambitious designs are going to provide. The next round can be the Amazon behavioral round, which consists of a variety of different questions aimed to understand your personality.

Amazon Behavioral Interview Guidance

The Amazon behavioral interview round is considered one of the most tricky rounds and challenging in Amazon. Many of the engineers who are applying to the different types of Amazon positions go through this mandatory behavioral interview round. There are various values and principles at Amazon which are evaluated during these rounds. Amazon has 14 leadership principles based on which these rounds ask questions to the candidate. The company values these principles very deeply and expects every employee in the organization to abide by these principles. Each of the interviewer panelists are tasked with three or four of these principles and accordingly they ask the questions to the candidates.

It is important to note that many of the candidates might be very proficient in a technical way but they might get eliminated during the behavioral round. It is important for you to be transparent while answering the questions and also give your answer which showcase that you already have implemented these Amazon principles in the past. You might not have known about the Amazon principles back then when you worked in your prior projects, but your actions reflected that you had these principles deep within you. The more you'll give your answers which are aligned with the leadership principles of Amazon, the more you get the chance to impress your interviewer.

Many of the times there are talented engineers who fall short in their behavioral interview round because their answers are not well prepared enough and they were not sure what to expect. Practice Amazon interview questions provided above to understand what you can expect in the Amazon behavioral interview. These interview questions will help you think through and learn what you can expect in the actual interview process. Having an idea of the types of questions that you can expect in the actual interview will give you enough time to prepare and think through and understand yourself better. Keep in mind that the questions during the Amazon behavioral interview might be repetitive so that the interviewer can actually see the person deep in you. So your preparation should be extremely robust.