AMD Senior Design Engineer Interview

Interviewed Jan 2007 in Sunnyvale, CA (took a day)

I submitted my resume through another company employee and it caught the attention of a manager who contacted me initially through the phone. He explained to me the project that he was hiring for and wanted to gauge my interest. We talked about potential responsibilities of the role and then arranged for an on-site interview.

The on-site interview took a little more than half-a-day. I was interviewed first by a more junior engineer who described to me the company culture and asked me some basic questions concerning chip-timing. I was then interviewed by a senior engineer, who later became my manager, concerning register files since I had mentioned on my resume that I recently worked on one. He wanted to gauge whether I had a large or small part in the design and whether I understood the most important concepts.

I was then taken to lunch by another senior engineer who told me why I should consider working for the company and the large scope of the project that I would be working on. He also conceded that on a chip this size, that my opportunities for vertical engineering (being involved in every aspect of the project from RTL, design, verification) and the number of block I would own might be more limited than at a startup but that the complexity of the problem was much greater than if I would join a smaller company.

I was then interviewed by the senior manager who contacted me. He asked me about computer architecture, specifically about the ALU Bypass loop (register file, bypass mux, comparator, adder) since I was involved in that area of design at a previous job. He also asked virtual to physical address translation which was also mentioned in part on my resume. This was followed by another interview where with another senior engineer who asked me to solve a tricky problem on transistor operating modes. Last, I was interviewed by a final senior manager about driving large loads through repeaters and how there was a useful upper limit on their sizes.

I was then escorted out of the building and told that a decision would be made quickly.