Python Interview with an Amazon engineer.

Python Interview with an Amazon engineer

Watch someone solve the substring concatenation problem in an interview with an Amazon engineer and see the feedback their interviewer left them. Explore this problem and others in our library of interview replays.

Python interview with an Amazon engineer: Substring concatenation - YouTube

Python interview with an Amazon engineer: Substring concatenation

Interview Summary

Problem type
Substring Concatenation
Interview question

  1. Count the amount of words in a string.
  2. You are given a string s and an array of strings words of the same length. Return all starting indices of substring(s) in s that is a concatenation of each word in words exactly once, in any order, and without any intervening characters.

Interview Feedback

Feedback about Nimble Panda (the interviewee)
Advance this person to the next round?

Yes
How were their technical skills?
3/4
How was their problem solving ability?
3/4
What about their communication ability?
4/4

This was a solid interview performance. You are really good at communicating your problem solving thought process. You identified edge cases and asked great clarifying questions. One way you can improve is to break down a problem into bite-size chunks that are easier to solve. You should feel empowered to suggest simplifying assumptions for your first implementation.

Feedback about Sizzling Shadow (the interviewer)
Would you want to work with this person?
Yes
How excited would you be to work with them?
4/4
How good were the questions?
4/4
How helpful was your interviewer in guiding you to the solution(s)?
4/4

I thought the interviewer communicated his thoughts well and also provided good insights into the process during the Q&A portion at the tail end of the interview. In addition, the interviewer kept a positive tone and made the process feel less nerve-wracking, which allowed me to focus better on coding instead of being anxious.

Interview Transcript

Sizzling Shadow: Can you hear me well?
Nimble Panda: Yes, I can. Can you hear me okay?
Sizzling Shadow: Yeah, perfectly. So I'll start with a quick introduction. Although it's anonymous, so I'll share my background. So I worked at Amazon for seven years as a software engineer, and then software engineering manager and I moved to a startup at the beginning of this year to build automation for filing requirements, that companies, so the government, and so with that, I'll pass it over to you to give me a quick introduction about your background.

Nimble Panda: Okay, so I actually worked as a data engineer for about three years now. The reason I'm doing this is trying to brush up my software engineering skills, because I am doing interviews where they do sort of ask some SE questions. I don't feel like I'm technically as strong as say a pure SE is, but I've been trying at least to practice. So yep, I'm currently interviewing for my next role.

(The transcript continues with a coding question where Nimble Panda is tasked to write a Python function to count words in a string, additional interactions on the coding process, and the feedback provided during the interview)

Key Points Discussed in the Interview