What Skills of Candidates Do the Amazon QA/ TEST Engineer Interviews?

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Undoubtedly, Amazon is the best e-commerce company and one of the strongest competitors with the highest salary in the IT industry. It employs the best talents at all levels.

Amazon's hiring process is rigorous and robust enough to screen the best candidates that fit the job description. That's why candidates need to go through several stages in an interview, and only a few candidates eventually make it through the interview.

It is a common fact that if we plan for an interview or any other activity in advance, we will achieve good results. So, In this article, we'll look at the Amazon Quality Assurance Engineer interview process, including the type of questions asked during the interview. In this way, you can clearly understand what Amazon expects from QA engineers and how to make yourself a successful candidate or excellent test engineer. We can also learn from Amazon's experience or practice in our interview to select excellent SQA/ test talents for our company.

Therefore, let's enter the scene of Amazon recruiters and begin to appreciate the scenery of Amazon interviewing QA candidates.

I. Testing skill assessment

II. Coding skill assessment

III. Analytical skill assessment

IV. Behavioral test

V. The Bar raiser

VI. Things to keep in mind

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I. Testing Skill Assessment

In the first round, the interviewer will evaluate your ability to plan test strategies and cases.

You will get real-time illustrations to provide a test strategy and a set of test cases. This basic test allows you to feel pressured and observe your performance. The interviewer may emphasize you to elaborate on the test case generation part. Below is a list of example test scenarios asked during such interviews.

• How do you create test plans and cases for the vending machine? [Functional Testing]
• How do you create test cases to break the Amazon system? [Focus on Negative Testing]
• How do you write test cases to examine the robustness of the Amazon system? [Stress Testing]

Now let's look at some example questions about the QA Engineer position at Amazon.

1. Review Some Real Example Questions

Here we list some practical and common questions to understand what the interviewer could ask.

• Write smoke tests for the given scenario. A system has three modules, and the development team fixes a defect in one module that is getting input from the other modules.
• Create a test plan for websites launching for the first time to sell E-Books.
• Write test cases for the given scenario. A customer chooses to buy a book using a credit card payment method.
• Write test cases for an application. The application uploads files (for example, text or pdf) from the local computer to a dropbox.
• What could be why QA did not catch the bug early enough in the production environment?
• Identify test cases related to on-line payment via credit card purchases made through mobile applications.
• What approach do you adopt for testing when your phone gets turned off every time you switch on the alarm?
• Write test cases to validate the API where the input is an URL to an HTML page. The API will parse the page, read the numbers inside the tags, and sort and store them in a file.

2. Find Out Some Tough Questions

• You need to write a plan to test the Amazon website, and we assume that it has two categories with 100 products in each category. It enables you to buy products, asks for customer information, and supports order tracking.
• How would you test Amazon search features, including category-based search? What tests will you automate, and what do you want?
• There is a graph showing the average number of days a defect spends in the "in-process" state. The X-axis reflects the daily/weekly/monthly duration. The Y-axis represents the number of days. Test conditions are laid down to clarify this graph.
• The user subscription form has a phone number field. The JavaScript restricts it to accept only numbers. But the back-end stores them as text. Do you think there's a problem? Is it a serious problem (high/medium/low)? Please explain your reason.

II. Coding Skill Assessment

In the second round of interviews, the interviewer will test you on coding questions and require you to be able to handle input/output data structures such as arrays and strings. If you are proficient in any programming language, then it is easy to pass this round of interviews. The interviewer may ask you to write test scripts when you finish coding.

• Write a script to count the number of occurrences of the given element in an array.
• What is a memory leak? Write a shell script to find memory leaks.
• Given a number in an array form. Write a program to move all zeros to the end.
• Given two ordered lists of sizes 7 and 3. The first list has three empty spaces at the end. You need to combine and sort them by the minimum number of steps.
• Write a script to print the number of occurrences of a given character or all letters in a string.
• How to reverse an array in the subset of N? For example, input: [1,3,5,7,9,11,15,17,19], output: [5,3,1,11,9,7,19,17,15].
• Write code to count the repeated characters in the given string.
• Calculate the frequency of characters in a string and print each character and its frequency. For example, for input , output should be <(a,2),(b,2),(c,2)>.
• How do you determine whether a given arithmetic expression is valid?
• Print a number's first and last occurrence in an integer-sorted array. For example, int[] list = {1,2,3,4,5,5,7,8}.
• Write a program to print the first non-repeating character in a string. For example, a string “Is it your first company” returns ‘u.’
• Write code to print a 2×2 matrix in the spiral format.

III. Analytical Skill Assessment

The interviewer mainly checks the ability how you solve problems and perform debugging, including how you solve algorithmic problems. You can use any programming language that you know. Basic analytical skills and data structure knowledge will help you complete your tasks successfully. You may encounter questions like "How to debug a website that gives 404 errors?" or "How would you check why a user cannot add an item to the shopping cart?". Here, you need to think deeply and devise a viable solution.

• A Desktop Java application that ran until yesterday crashed today. How would you debug it？
• You are installing a device driver, and it crashed. How would you debug it?
• You are trying to run a video file, but it does not open. How would you debug it?
• The bug tracking system is not working. What would you do in this situation?

IV. Behavioral Test

The interviewer will assess your adaptability, competitiveness, confidence, and cooperation. During this round, the questions may vary depending on the position you are applying for.

• Why did you leave your last company?
• What is the reason for joining Amazon?
• Don't you like your last job?
• How do you contribute to the quality of the product?
• How do you contribute to the development of our company?
• What is the first measure you would take after joining Amazon?

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V. Bar Raiser

In this round, you may face problems related to previous rounds. Bar Raiser will investigate you to the extent they think you can raise the Amazon standard. Therefore, you must demonstrate that you have mastered all of the abovementioned abilities and show the character of perseverance and curb arrogance.

• This is an open round where candidates can answer various questions.
• This round is relatively complex compared to the other interview rounds.
• It's a process to ensure the quality of employees reaches a certain threshold.
• Interviewers are good at asking follow-up questions to expose your natural tendencies.
• In most cases of this interview round, the interviewer usually asks behavior questions.

Bar raiser's strategy of interviewing candidates was implemented at the beginning of the company's establishment and has been improved and implemented until now by Amazon CEO Bezos. Amazon believes this strategy can screen out people unsuitable for the company's culture and help Amazon maintain its progressiveness in this era of e-commerce competition.

This strategy of interviewing candidates by Bar raiser was implemented at the beginning of the company's establishment and has been improved and implemented until now by Amazon CEO Bezos. Amazon believes that this strategy can screen out people who are not suitable for the company's culture and then help Amazon maintain its progressiveness in this era of e-commerce competition.

According to a former Amazon employee, there are hundreds of bar raisers within Amazon at present, and this job can lead to faster promotion. Bar raisers is a voluntary work without additional compensation. Each Bar raiser interviews about ten people per week, taking about 2-3 hours each, including written examination and interview, which can take up more time. These Bar raisers have to do their jobs while doing recruitment work, such as finance, marketing, and development. So some employees don't want to be bar raisers, and there are some problems with the mechanism, leading to the lack of bar raisers.

VI. Things to Keep in Mind

• For each problem, you must devise a simple solution and then consider an optimal one.
• You should program with clear and correct syntax because the interviewer understands the code without your intervention.
• You should be able to distinguish the complexity of the code.
• You must try to support your answers with practical and concrete examples.
• Don't get confused and ask for clarification. It won't hurt but help.

VII. Other Interview Questions

• Test plan for Amazon login screen;
• From a given list of the array (Not sorted), find the second largest value;
• Find the prime numbers from the given list of the array (1 -100);
• Find the shortest path between 2 points on a 2d matrix;
• Find the union of two strings?
• Given an array with numbers 1-5, how would you subtract one number from each index?
• Given an array with numbers 1-5, how would you subtract one number from every EVEN number in each index?
• How to automate an API that retrieves bank and cardholder information based on the Credit card number given as input;
• How would you test payment processing;
• What else would you test?
• Have you been able to work on multiple projects?
• Write a function in any language that will print "AN" if a number is divisible by 8, "ANIM" if divisible by 16, and "ANIMAL" if divisible by 32.