Amazon (Reject) | Microsoft (Offer)

Background: 4 years of Industry experience in Hardware Design; done some software and ML in my current job... PhD from a top 20 university (not CS)

Easy/Medium/Hard 471/952/381

Amazon (reject): Contacted by recruiter for Applied Scientist Position; it had 1 phone interview, coding and ML basics, coding qq was:

Find Median from Data Stream

I coded it up with a sorted list; got the onsite

Onsite: 3 ML rounds, 1 coding, 1 behavioral; coding:

Reconstruct Itinerary

Though it says medium, to me it was hard, I coded to some extend; if there were no loops my code worked.

They came back to me with the comment that my ML knowledge was not enough; thus a rejection.

Microsoft (offer):

Interviewed with 2 different groups for ML software engineer; each of them had 4 rounds, one was the famous coin exchange problem, the other one was something like course schedule 1 or 2, the rest, I dont remember the rest of the coding qqs; some of them was also ML knowledge; computer architecture, etc...

One was for Senior Software Engineer and one for Software Engineer 2; I got the latter. I'd aimed for a FAANG but still very good given that my title does not say Software at my current position. I have accepted the Microsoft offer.