Security Engineer II Interview Experience
Interview process
This was my first big tech interview, but I have ten years of experience. It was much less technically heavy than I expected. There was a fifteen minute talk with the initial recruiter to set expectations, a one hour technical screening, then a four hour loop with the option for a 30 minute "candid chat" with a member of an employee group. I chose a member of the mental health and families groups, though there were options for various minority groups. I was told that Bar Raisers are for L6 and above positions. I was also told by the recruiter that the people who interviewed you must collectively decide that you are better than fifty percent of L5's to clear the bar. The loop tested for competency in GenAI, Scripting, Code Review, Security Fundamentals, and Leadership Principles. The actual round by round breakdown was: 1) Hiring Manger -> Leadership Principles 2) Someone Not on The Team -> Leadership Principles 3) Peer -> Scripting and Security Fundamentals 4) Senior Engineer Team mate -> Code Review, Leadership Principles 5) Employee Group Member -> candid chat about working at Amazon, no interview questions. Was actually a nice talk.
- Recruiter screen
- Phone interview
- Final round
Interview tips
The recruiter will send you a list of relevant leadership principles, make sure to have a story ready for each bullet point beneath each principle, as well as each bullet point beneath each functional competency. There can be some overlap because you will not use them all. You will be offered a prep meeting with the recruiters. Make sure you go. The script you will be asked to write is simple. Mine was 30 lines including import statements. Make sure to talk through the naive case and do a little error handling, a little input checking, and a little talking about performance and maintainability. They are not expecting perfect syntax. I put the messiest format string of my life in that code and they did not care. Do naive versions of the projects on the Grace Nolan list to prepare. There was one sample to review code and it was fifteen lines with several problems. Nothing too tricky, know your OWASP Top 10 including cryptography. Doing the code snippet exercises alone on PentesterLab was more than enough prep.
Company culture
Customer Obsession is a serious and tested throughout in various ways.
Questions asked
Question types asked
Specific questions asked
Tell me about a time that a customer came to you and asked for something that was not in their best interest.
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