My Amazon Front-End Engineer interview a little over a month ago wasn’t successful. I wasn’t sure if I’d write about it, but I decided to share my experience anyway. Hopefully, this insight will be useful for those of you looking to switch jobs or curious about interviewing at major tech firms like FAANG.
How to Get an Interview
A question I often get asked by friends is whether big companies filter out resumes from candidates without a bachelor’s degree. In my job search, even major companies like Amazon only mention requirements like:
“2+ years of professional non-internship experience with front-end, web, or mobile software development using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.”
If they do mention “a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in computer science or a related field,” it’s usually followed by “or of equivalent working experience” or similar phrasing.
So, don’t think that all the big tech companies in North America only look at prestigious university diplomas. If you think you’ve got what it takes, whether you’re from a top university, a college, or even a coding bootcamp, just go for it!
I’m a college graduate myself with about two years of experience, and honestly, I’ve been slacking off quite a bit since working from home started with the pandemic. I initially applied to Amazon just to test the waters, not really expecting to pass the resume screening. Lately, I’ve seen a ton of Amazon job postings on LinkedIn, all for Toronto, so I just casually applied to a few Front End Engineer roles. To my surprise, I got an interview invitation!
I submitted my resume on a Sunday evening and received the interview notification first thing Monday morning. Wow, truly efficient companies get things done! Compared to many other companies—though I haven’t kept an exact count, I’ve probably sent out dozens, if not over a hundred, resumes in this recent job hunt—most of them have just gone into a black hole. It really makes me feel like job searching is a bit like buying a lottery ticket. You just have to try every opportunity you can; you never know, you might just hit the jackpot.
Interview Prep
Next up is the phone interview, which consists of both tech and non-tech sections and lasts a total of 60 minutes.
In the interview invitation email, you’ll receive a bunch of PDFs described as “interview-related materials.” These include an introduction to the team, since I’m interviewing for Amazon Ads, it will explain what this team specifically does, the role of a frontend engineer within it, and career prospects.
Other PDFs will detail how to prepare for both interview sections. The email body mentions there will be two technical questions during the interview. These are live coding sessions, where the interviewer can see your entire coding process as you interact with them. The non-tech portion focuses on Amazon’s well-known Leadership Principles. This means you’ll need to use their keywords when describing your project experience to demonstrate that you possess the qualities Amazon looks for in a leader.
Tech Interview
Knowing that big tech companies often focus their technical interviews on LeetCode, I pretty much spent my entire two weeks of prep time on it. I only managed to get through the first few pages of easy-level problems on LeetCode, so honestly, two weeks of serious grinding probably wasn’t enough. At the time, I figured I was just going to be cannon fodder, so I just went with it…
But a heads-up: if you’re aiming for a big tech company, you absolutely, 100% need to prepare early! Job interviews, especially for these companies, are like the Gaokao (college entrance exam) – you have to prepare for everything, 360 degrees. It’s not just LeetCode; you also need to list all the frontend development interview questions you might get asked in a little notebook and go through them one by one. You’ve gotta prepare like a pro!
Behavior Interview
Even though these Leadership Principles felt as annoying as rote memorization, I knew I had to prepare them thoroughly to pass the interview. Of the 16 principles, I picked the main 7 or 8 and prepared a past project experience for each to discuss.
Amazon’s email suggested preparing two different cases for each principle. And when talking about your project experiences, you’re supposed to use their STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Results) method, plus include data-driven examples.
So, I had a friend help me with behavioral interview prep, and wow, even though these were projects I did myself, narrating them logically was surprisingly tough! My friend ended up rephrasing everything for me, which made my responses sound much more professional and precise.
Interview Process
Non-tech Behaviour Interview:
The interview kicked off with the behavioral questions. The initial one was about my most exciting recent project. Once I finished explaining, there were a lot of follow-up questions, like: If you had to do it again, what specific adjustments would you make? And what criteria did you use to make decisions at various project phases?
The second question involved describing a project I finished under tight deadlines recently. There were other follow-ups, but I’m blanking on the exact details. The key to these questions was integrating the 16 Leadership Principles throughout my answers and using the suggested STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Results) narrative structure. This whole section probably lasted about 20 minutes.
Tech Interview:
The technical interview didn’t start with live coding. Instead, it kicked off with a few technical questions, such as “What are the solutions to improve page loading speed?” and some basic questions about frontend frameworks.
Then came the live coding segment. I had prepared for a LeetCode-style challenge, but to my surprise, it was a frontend framework problem. The task was essentially to write a small application using a framework I was familiar with (Vue, Angular, React, or even vanilla JavaScript), including both the UI and the underlying functionality. There was no runtime environment, so the focus was on my coding logic and my fundamental grasp of frontend frameworks.
It’s worth noting that if you make minor syntax errors, the interviewer will usually give you a friendly heads-up; these generally aren’t reasons to fail you. What they look for is your overall logic and foundational skills.
Conclusion
My takeaway from this interview is that for the non-technical section, your past project experience and how you logically describe it during the interview are crucial.
For the technical part, I used to hear that tech interviews would make you “build a rocket ship” or at least test you on LeetCode problems like recursion and binary trees. I’m not sure about backend development or general software engineer interviews, but it seems frontend interviews focus more on your fundamental skills (I also encountered JavaScript fundamentals and frontend framework Q&A in another company’s interview). So, it’s not a good idea to slack off in your actual work… because a “slacking off” interview like mine can easily expose you.
Anyway, that’s my interview experience sharing. Hope everyone interviewing soon passes with flying colors!
