Hiring decision in Amazon

After the onsite loop is finished, the interviewing team gathers to take the decision. This meeting has multiple parties involved.

• The recruiter: He is your defending partner inside the loop, he does his best to make sure you are hired if you deserve that.
• The HM: He is the manager that has a position open, he interviews you, and if he thinks you are a good candidate, it’s in his best interest to hire you as well.
• The Bar Raiser: He can be one of the technical interviewers, or a non-technical with just all-LP round, or even just an observer in the meeting without actually interviewing you, his job is to defend the company’s policy, and make sure to hire you only when you raise the bar for the company. This is the only person that has veto power to reject a person.
• The interview team: This includes all other SDEs that interviewed you.

The bar raiser starts by going around, taking any high level comments, then commencing with all the competencies that Amazon measures against. Every interviewer gets to show his feedback, gets asked on it, tries to convince the team with his decision.
Prior to the meeting, every interviewer must input his feedback, that includes if he agrees with hiring you or not, then the bar raiser challenges each person to make sure the feedback is fair, and that the decision the interviewer chose is justified.

Assessment factors

The main factors assessed in this meeting are:

• LPs: This is the basic fit-test for you in Amazon, if you show red flags here, or not enough data in all rounds, or worse, signs of lying, you will get rejected.
• Coding: You should be able to code comfortably, write clean code, but it’s accepted that it can be at a coachable level, given that your LPs are great.
• Communication: This is taken into account while assessing you, you should be asking clarifying questions, explaining your directions before jumping into code, making sure the interviewer notes and hints are heard to demonstrate that you are able to be coached/mentored.
• Years of Experience: If you are applying for an entry level role, some lack of LP situations, or less communications might be accepted, but if you are on the higher levels and experiences bar, you are expected to be leading the conversation, and making sure everyone is getting your explanations and directions.
• Design: This can be HLD or LLD depending on your level and experience, but it’s assessed heavily and is one of the main reasons people are downleveled from L6 to L5.
• Candidate competencies: This is the most important one, candidates are not compared to each other, you are compared to the current Amazon SDEs, if multiple candidates are applying for the same role, they are never compared against each other, every one is assessed only based on his interview.

Good signs

There are some signs that are generally taken into account positively, and have resulted into candidates being accepted because of them:

• Good communications: This helps the team a lot, as this is expected from everyone in Amazon.
• Improvising: Even if you get a question you have never seen before, being able to think on the spot, and reach even a sub optimal solution, is a very good sign.
• Being a good team player: If your LPs show that you have good signs of that, this strengthens your position.

Once the decision is taken, if the result is positive, the recruiter goes ahead and takes it from there.
If the result is negative, the recruiter surveys the team if the candidate can be downleveled or not, and the cooldown period required if not the default period.

Good luck in your interview!