Amazon Engineering Manager Interview Questions

Aymen D. - "It would have been more interesting to focus on the system design rather than the Trie DS, Interviewee could have just mentioned the Trie and passed to things more important. Interviewee should have focused on the factors on which he wants to scale the API servers, popularity of the query parts ? region may be ? A hash of many factors ? Caches should have definitely be discussed, Cache eviction policies, Cache invalidation managements... Interviewee should have mentioned which kind of API pro"See full answer

James W. - "I've recently worked closely with a product that had both the best and worst performing teams. The situation is that one team is struggling to deliver within a reasonable timeframe, a few stronger members of the team are carrying the weaker. Work is taking a long time. They aren't listening to each other. They aren't helping each other to get work over the line. They are getting stuck down rabbit holes. They aren't continually improving their processes. They are getting frustrated and at risk o"See full answer

Ilnur I. - "I really appreciate how he clearly explains every term he uses!"See full answer

Scott S. - " The Situation A few months ago, our trading platform started experiencing significant latency issues during peak trading hours. This latency was affecting our ability to process real-time market data and execute trades efficiently, potentially leading to substantial financial losses and missed opportunities. Identifying the Problem The first step was to identify the root cause of the latency. I organized a team meeting with our data engineers, DevOps, and network specialists to gather"See full answer

Sam T. - "demonstrate your ability to recognize and nurture talent, provide growth opportunities, and create an environment that supports and challenges high-performing individuals. Use a real-life example to illustrate your approach and showcase your leadership skills. Managing high performers is an exciting and rewarding aspect of being an engineering manager. These individuals are often the driving force behind innovation, productivity, and success within a team. As a manager, it's crucial to recogni"See full answer

Santhosh K. - "As an engineering manager, motivation is key to the success of the team. Here are some ways to motivate the team: Set clear goals: Clearly defined goals help team members understand what they're working towards and give them a sense of purpose. Offer growth opportunities: Providing opportunities for professional development and advancement can increase motivation and job satisfaction. Provide recognition and rewards: Recognising and rewarding team members for their hard work and achieve"See full answer

onering2ruleall - "My leadership style is flexible and adaptive, it varies depending on the team members and the needs of the company. My leadership goal is to empower the team and inspire and grow leaders. In order to achieve that, I combine transformational, democratic and coaching leadership styles. Usually when we are facing a new type of challenge, or at the early stage of a project, I like to adapt the transformational leadership which allows me to listen to all the suggestions from the team members and sta"See full answer

Saket S. - "I will use the following approach for this situation: Understand Current Status of the Program: Program Goals, Schedule, How many teams, what are their deliverables, dependencies between teams Team level view of progress: Through tools like Burn down charts, Gantt charts etc. Identify laggards (lagging teams). Trend analysis for lagging teams: Understand at what point, the decline started. If the decline has started around same time, then following may be the potential issues: -"See full answer

Yag S. - "I studied Exponent's TinyURL system design video. My interviewer was asking many detailed questions on API design, schema, as well as data required to store. I found system design questions are bit high level instead of depth. I think should have detail design of API, schema and some additional flavors."See full answer

Sourabh G. - "Functional Requirement Monitor health, metrics Alert in case of failure/anomaly Visualize the live health Analyse machines on periodic basis Non Functional Should not exert load on machines low latency Highly scalable Logs/Metrics Gathering push - machine gather and send to system and low priority background thread along with batching pull - heart beat check (for offline machines) Processing Real time streaming using Kafka/kinesis + Flink TimeSeries database for stor"See full answer

Scott S. - " Situation In the derivatives trading domain, timely and accurate data is crucial for making informed trading decisions. Our existing data processing system was facing challenges with latency and scalability, which hindered our ability to react swiftly to market changes. To address these issues, we designed a new real-time market data processing platform. Task The task was to develop a low-latency data processing platform that could handle real-time market data ingestion, processing, an"See full answer

Catherine I. - "I always ask to clarify if this is a brand new team. If so, then I focus on bringing in people with strong technical aptitudes(since I'm hiring for software engineering), but also team members that have experience mentoring and good communication is a must. I look for people who have leadership qualities. I emphasize that building a brand new team isn't something I can do on my own, so the initial hires of that team are very important to help me expand it."See full answer

Neo S. - "I gave an example of a situation where on the project we needed to onboard 110 applications into the system to get their account and entitlement information for quarterly access review work stream. Traditionally we could have gone manual route and could have done it manually one by one which would have required more time and resources. I actually understood the applications and how they are built by talking to application owners and then based on the data bucketed them and found the pattern that"See full answer

Sudhakar P. - "When talking about my role in current team, I talked following things: High level technologies used. Collaboration work I did with PM and Design counter parts. Web UX features that we built. Hiring and boot strapping team from 0. Given that there is straight match to the profile hiring manager was looking for, he got pretty excited and spent time selling the job."See full answer