You've grinded LeetCode until it shows up in your dreams. Doesn't matter. You can still bomb the interview.

Onur, a senior engineering manager at Amazon who's run over 300 interviews, says candidates treat live coding and system design like the main course when they're just the snack. Heather Morelli, who's led engineering teams at Salesforce and Tableau, is allergic to small talk and wants you in the meat of it inside a minute. David Garcia Casas, a senior program manager at Amazon, says the people who get remembered are the ones willing to be curious, get it wrong, and try again.

What we get into:

• How to think out loud in a live coding round instead of going quiet

• The system design framework that keeps you from freezing at the whiteboard

• Building a bank of STAR-method stories before you ever need one

• The one-line follow-up email that actually gets read