How to Prepare for the Amazon QA Engineer Interview?

Are you preparing for an interview as a Quality Assurance Engineer at Amazon? If so, read on for valuable insights shared by some of our readers. Amazon is known for being one of the best e-commerce companies and offers competitive salaries in the IT industry. They are highly selective in their hiring process, which consists of multiple stages to identify the best candidates for the job, whether it’s for a developer role or a Quality Assurance Engineer position.

To increase your chances of success, it’s essential to plan and prepare in advance. Our goal is to provide you with an understanding of Amazon’s interview structure and the potential questions you may be asked as a Quality Assurance Engineer. This will help you align your preparations to meet Amazon’s expectations and perform well in the interview. Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of an Amazon recruiter and dive into the interview process for the QAE position.

Check out the below Table of Index to quickly navigate through the various stages of the Amazon QA interview process.

Table of Index

• Testing skill assessment
• Coding skill assessment
• Analytical skill assessment
• Behavioral test
• The Bar raiser
• Things to keep in mind

Amazon QA Engineer Interview Process and Planning

Testing skill assessment (Stage I)

In the first round, the interviewer will evaluate how good you are at planning the test strategy and test cases.

You’ll get real-time illustrations to deliver a testing strategy accompanied by a set of test cases. It’s a basic test to stress you out and see how you perform.

They might emphasize you elaborate on the test case generation part.

Here is a list of example test scenarios asked during such interviews.

• Create a test plan and test cases for the vending machine. [Functional testing]
• Create test cases to break the Amazon system. [Focused-error testing]
• Write test cases to examine the robustness of the Amazon system. [Stress testing]

Now see some example questions for the Amazon quality assurance engineer position.

Review some real sample questions

Here, we’ve captured some of the most practical questions. It should give you a fair idea of what could they ask from you.

• Write smoke tests for the given scenario.
• A system has three modules. The dev team fixed a defect in one module which gets input from other modules.
• Create a test plan for the below use case.
  • First time launch of a website that sells digital books.
• Write test cases for the given scenario.
  • Customers choose to buy a book using the credit card payment option.
• Write down test cases for an App.
  • The app uploads files (e.g. text or pdf) from the local machine to Dropbox.
• There was a bug found in production. What could be the reason QA didn’t catch it earlier?
• Identify test cases related to online payment via the credit card for purchases done through a mobile app.
• What’s the approach you adopt for testing when your phone gets turned off every time you switch on the alarm?
• Write test cases to validate an API whose input is a URL to an HTML page. The API shall parse the page, read numbers inside the tags, and sort and store them in a file.

Must Read: 100+ Manual Testing Interview Questions.

Check out a few tough questions

1. Write a plan to test the Amazon website. Assume it has two categories with 100 products each. It lets you buy a product, asks for customer information, and supports order tracking.
2. How would you test the Amazon search feature including the category-based searches? What tests will you automate and what not?
3. There is a graph that displays the average number of days the defects spend in the “In progress” state. The X-axis reflects the daily/weekly/monthly duration. Y axis expresses the count in days. Lay down the test conditions to certify this graph.
4. A user subscription form has a phone number field. JavaScript limits it to accept only numbers. But the backend stores them as text. Do think is there an issue? High/Medium/Low? Justify.

Coding skill assessment (Stage II)

In this second round of interviews, they will give you coding problems. And ask you to arrays and strings for writing scripts. If you are good in any programming language, then it’s easy to get through. When you finish coding the script, then do write the test cases as well. Or the interviewer may ask you to do so.

Now see some example questions for the Amazon quality assurance engineer position.

Questions asked in Amazon interviews

1. Write a script to count the number of occurrences of the given element in an array.
2. What’s a memory leak? Write a shell script to find memory leaks
3. Given a number in an array form. Write a program to move all zeros to the end.
4. Given are two ordered lists of sizes 7 and 3. The first list has three vacant spots in the end. Merge them in a sorted manner with a minimum number of steps.
5. Write a script to print the number of occurrences of a given character or all letters in a string.
6. How to reverse an array in the subset of N? e.g. Input: [1,3,5,7,9,11,15,17,19], Output: [5,3,1,11,9,7,19,17,15].
7. Write code to count the duplicate characters in a given string.
8. Calculate the frequency of characters in a string. Print each char with its frequency. e.g. For input <abcabc>, output should be <(a,2),(b,2),(c,2)>.
9. How to find if a given arithmetic expression is a valid one?
10. Print the first and final occurrence of a number in a sorted array of integers.
    e.g. int[] list = {1,2,3,4,5,5,7,8}
11. Write a program to print the first non-repeated char in a string. e.g. A string “Is it your first company” returns ‘u’.
12. Write code to print a 2×2 matrix in a spiral format.

Analytical skill assessment (Stage III)

Mainly, they’ll check how apt are you in problem-solving and debugging. You’ll get to solve an algorithmic problem in this round. You can use any programming language that you know. Basic analytic skills and data structure knowledge will help you in clearing the round. You may face questions related to debugging like “How to debug a Website giving a 404 error?” or “How would you check why the user is failing to add an item to the cart?”. Here you need to think deeply and come up with viable solutions.

Sample Amazon QAE Questions

1. A Desktop Java application that was working till yesterday crashed today. How do you go about debugging this scenario?
2. You were installing a device driver, and it crashed. How would you debug?
3. You were trying to run a video file but it didn’t open. How would you debug?
4. The bug tracking system is not working. What would you do in this situation?

Behavioral test (Stage IV))

It’s going to be a test where they will evaluate you for adaptability, competitiveness, confidence, and cooperation. In this round, the questions can vary depending on the position you’ve applied for. Here is a list of questions to help candidates who have applied for the post of Amazon quality assurance engineer.

1. Why did you switch your last company?
2. What’s the reason to join Amazon?
3. What’s one thing you don’t like about the last job?
4. How can you contribute to the quality of the product?
5. How can you contribute to the growth of our company?
6. What’s the first initiative you would take after joining Amazon?

The Bar raiser (Stage V)

In the bar raiser round, you may face questions related to any of the previous rounds. The interviewers will probe you to the extent they feel you can raise the bar at Amazon. You’ve to show that you’ve mastered all the competencies we discussed above. Exhibit persistence and curb arrogance. You’ll certainly be able to secure a seat at Amazon.

1. It’s a kind of open round where the candidates get to answer a variety of questions. Let’s now hear from excerpts shared by many of our readers.
2. Bar raiser is like a pair coding round. One has to give an optimized solution for the problem.
3. If compared to other rounds, the bar raiser was a bit easier.
4. It’s a process to ensure the quality of hires is above a certain threshold.
5. The bar-raisers are good at asking follow-up questions. Their intention is to expose your natural tendencies.
6. In most interview loops, the bar raisers typically ask behavioral questions.

Also Read: Top 20 Selenium Coding Tips for Software Testers.

Things to keep in mind

1. For every problem, come up with a simple solution first. And then think of an optimal solution.
2. Program with clear and proper syntax. The interviewer should understand the code without your intervention.
3. You should be able to tell the complexity of your code.
4. Try to support your answers with useful examples.
5. Don’t confuse instead ask for clarification. It won’t hurt but help.

All the best and we hope this blog post will help you succeed in the Amazon quality assurance engineer interview.

Cheers,

TechBeamers