How to Prepare for Amazon Quality Assurance Engineer Interview?

Software Testing TutorialMeenakshi Agarwal

Did you get an invitation for Amazon quality assurance engineer interview? Or are you preparing for the
QAE position at Amazon?

If your answer is a Yes for any of the two questions, then you must read this post till the end. We would
try to walk you through some real-time insights that some of our readers have experienced and shared
with us.

Amazon is undoubtedly the best e-commerce company and one of the highest paymaster in the IT
industry. It hires the best talent at all levels.

The recruiters at Amazon make sure that the hiring process is rigorous and robust enough to filter the
right candidates for the job profile. That’s why they keep several stages in an interview. And only a few
candidates make it through all stages.

They award equal weight age to all positions whether it’s a developer or the requirement of an Amazon
quality assurance engineer.

It’s a universal fact that if you plan for an interview or any other activity in advance, then odds are you’ll
do well when it happens.

Hence, our attempt is to inform you how Amazon structures an interview and what could be the
possible questions asked from an Amazon quality assurance engineer. So that, you could get a clear idea
of what Amazon expects from a QAE. And tailor your plans wisely to execute them smartly.

So let’s step into the shoes of the Amazon recruiter and start interviewing for the QAE position.

Check out the below Table of Index to quickly navigate through the various stages of 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 Quality Assurance Engineer Interview Process and Planning.
Amazon Quality Assurance Engineer Interview Guide
Amazon Quality Assurance Engineer Interview.
Stage-1) Testing skill assessment.
In the first round, the interviewer will evaluate how good you are at planning into 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 to elaborate on the test case generation part.

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

#1- Create a test plan and test cases for the Vending Machine? [Functional testing]

#2- Create test cases to break the Amazon system? [Focused-error testing]

#3- 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.

1.1- Review some real example 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.

💡 Further Reading – 50 Manual Testing Interview Questions.

Sample Amazon QAE Questions.

1- Write smoke tests for the given scenario.

A system has three modules. Dev team fixed a defect in one module which gets input from other
modules.

2- Create a test plan for the below use case.

First time launch of a website that sells digital books.

3- Write test cases for the given scenario.

Customers choose to buy a book using the credit card payment option.

4- Write down test cases for an App.

The app uploads files (e.g. text or pdf) from the local machine to a dropbox.

5- There was a bug found in production. What could be the reason QA didn’t catch it earlier? 6-
Identify test cases related to an online payment via the credit card for purchases done through a mobile
app. 7- What’s the approach you adopt for testing when your phone gets turned off every time you
switch on the alarm? 8- Write test cases to validate an API whose input is an URL to an HTML page.
The API shall parse the page, read numbers inside the tags, sort and store them in a file.
1.2- Check out a few tough questions.
Sample Amazon QAE Questions.

1- Write a plan to test 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 you won’t? 3- There is a graph which displays the average no. of days the defects spend in
“In progress” state. 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. The JavaScript limits it to accept only numbers. But the backend stores them as text. Do think is
there an issue? High/Medium/Low? Justify.

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Stage-2) Coding skill assessment.

In this second round of interview, 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 so.

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

2.1- Find out questions asked in Amazon interviews.

Sample Amazon QAE Questions.
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 size 7 and 3. The first list has
three vacant spots in the end. Merge them in a sorted manner with minimum no. of steps.
5- Write a script to print the no. 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 the spiral format.

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Stage-3) Analytical skill assessment.

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 404 error?” or “How would you check why the user is
failing to add an item to the cart?”. Here you need to think deep and come up with viable solutions.

Sample Amazon QAE Questions.

1- A Desktop Java application which was working till yesterday crashes today. How do you go about
debugging this scenario? 2- You were installing a device driver, 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?

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Stage-4) Behavioral test.

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 upon the position you’ve applied. Here is a
list of questions to help candidates who have applied for the post of Amazon quality assurance engineer.

4.1- Why did you switch your last company?

4.2- What’s the reason to join Amazon?

4.3- What’s one thing you don’t like about the last job?

4.4- How can you contribute to the quality of the product?

4.5- How can you contribute to the growth of our company?

4.6- What’s the first initiative you would take after joining Amazon?

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Stage-5) The Bar raiser.

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.

5.1- It’s a kind of an open round where the candidates get to answer a variety of questions. Let’s now
hear from excerpts shared by many of our readers.

5.2- Bar raiser is like a pair coding round. One has to give an optimized solution for the problem.

5.3- Comparing to other rounds bar raiser was easy.

5.4- It’s a process to ensure the quality of hires to be above a certain threshold.
5.5- The bar-raisers are good at asking the follow-up questions. Their intention is to expose your natural
tendencies.

5.6- In most interview loops, the bar raisers typically ask the behavioral questions.

💡 Recommended – Top 20 Selenium Coding Tips for Software Testers.

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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.

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All the best and wish this blog post would help you succeed in Amazon quality assurance engineer
interview.

TechBeamers.
Amazon Interview Experience | Set 420 (For QAE)
I got a referral from an employee for the QAE position at Chennai and after applying I got call from
Amazon the very next day. They scheduled the phone call interview. The interviewer didn’t show up on
the scheduled date.
So we scheduled again to a new date.

Phone Interview:
1) Asked test cases for Amazon Shopping Cart.
2) You are hosting a web app in your server which is accessible only to a particular set of people. But on
an unusual day, all the people are able to access your web app. How would you troubleshoot this issue?

3) Given an array, find the largest product of two consecutive elements.

Phone interview went well and I got a call from Amazon within a week for scheduling onsite rounds. 4
onsite face to face interviews were scheduled.
Face to Face 1:
1) Test cases for analog alarm clock.
2) Test cases for lift.
3) You are hosting a game in your server. All the users are connected to the game. When one user tries
to connect to the multiplayer game he gets Error Occured message. How would you troubleshoot this
scenario?

Face to Face 2:
1) Asked about my current project in depth.

2) Given an integer, find the nearest palindrome to that number.

Eg1. I/P : 115 O/P : 111
Eg2. I/P : 117 O/P : 121

3) Given an array, find the first duplicate element.

Eg. I/P : [1, 2, 4, 4, 1, 3, 7, 5, 5, 2]
O/P : 4
4) Given a sentence, reverse all the words in that sentence.
Eg. I/P : This is sample text
O/P : sihT si elpmas txet

5) Asked all test data for the amazon login page.

Bar Raiser Round:

2) How would you test Whispersync feature in Kindle.
3) Given two sorted linked lists, merge the lists in a sorted manner with constant extra space.

4) Asked all possible behavioral questions like

a) What is the most challenging/complex job that you did?
b) Any misunderstanding scenario with you manager and teammates?
c) Why are you interested in QAE?
d) How would you handle pressure?

Managerial Round:
1) Asked about my current project in depth.
2) Again asked all possible behavioral questions to test whether I can handle pressure situations and
How do I handle prioritization of jobs and about my testing strategy.
3) Given an integer, find sum of digits of that number until sum becomes single digit
and asked the test data for the same.

Programming questions were easy. They do stress much on test cases and troubleshooting.
All the Best!!!