Glassdoor users rated their interview experience at American Express as 100% positive with a difficulty rating score of 2.5 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty). Candidates interviewing for Travel Consultant and rated their interviews as the hardest, whereas interviews for Travel Consultant and roles were rated as the easiest.
I interviewed at American Express (London, England)
Interview
2 back to back with 2. Directors, overall nice people
Standard and structured questions, they seem to have a list of questions and don’t have much room for adjustments
About 1 hr in total
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at American Express (Bengaluru) in May 2024
Interview
How did I get to know about the role?
I had applied for a staff engineer on American Express Career Portal
Amex Recruiter contacted over phone based on my submission after few weeks
What is my years of experience?
17 Years
What is my expertise?
Architecture: Distributed, Microservices, REST, Event driven, API
Programming: Object Oriented (Java Spring Boot (Latest Experience)), Node.js (Past Experience), Spark (Past)
Messaging and Streaming: Apache Kafka
Database: Relational DBMS such as Oracle, Exadata. NoSQL DB such as Mongo
Packaging & Container Orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
Interview process
The first round was Hiring Manager Interview(Online-30 Minutes) consisting of below conversation areas
Introduction
Advertised job profile explanation
My experience in the past
How did I handle challenge, disappointment as part of professional life
Experience dealing with customers
Second round was Karat driven video interview consisting of below sections( Total time 60 minutes)
1. 3 to 4 system design questions(25 Minutes) emphasizing on best practice, drawbacks on the given problem statement, estimation for budget considering a specific time duration, changes needed in order to scale.Some of the questions that I remember are as follows
a)There is a video streaming app and using physical servers to have multiple copies of same video. What are the improvement areas?
b)There is a online crossword puzzle app. Hint giving feature to solve crossword is being planned with two ways. First way is to get hint by hitting server and second way is to have it inbuilt as part of the app. Advantage and drawback with each of these two approach
c)There is a need to process large XML file in a local computer and this process is exhausting local computer RAM. How do you resolve this issue?
d) Facebook like app which is popular in US is planning to launch its debut in other countries. Necessary front end changes are incorporated. What changes are needed in the backend in order to launch in other country?
e)Question like factors needed to be considered in order to plan a budget for system design.
2. Coding problem having a piece of code and problem statement. Emphasis is on the approach to solve the problem( 30 Minutes)
Karat sends the feedback to the hiring company(AMEX) as soon as the assessment gets over(within 30 minutes). Candidate gets email confirmation saying feedback is sent to the hiring company
I called HR of AMEX next day twice only for my call to go unanswered. Email sent to him yields a response saying "Feedback is still awaited from Karat". He did not revert when I replied to him saying Karat had already confirmed saying they have sent the feedback. I followed up after a week on the same and HR responded saying feedback is negative. HR goes incommunicado when I asked for the detailed assessment from AMEX which they would have got from Karat.
Few questions still puzzles me on the hiring transparency by AMEX
AMEX HR conveniently does not answer your call and does not possess professionalism to return your call
AMEX HR evades the responding to your query. In my case - saying feedback is not received where as they had already received the feedback from Karat.
AMEX does not share the detailed assessment feedback as part of their hiring. Goes incommunicado.
There are 4 rounds, including the recruiter screening interview. Second round is with the hiring leader, third is with 4 members of the GCO, and fourth is again with the hiring leader and another member of the GCO. They are also requesting I complete a written exercise.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How do you manage your time when you have competing tasks of priority?