Amazon ACMS Interview Experience

Hi! If you’re looking to know about ACMS, I am here to share my experience with it.

What is ACMS?

Amazon Campus Mentorship Series(ACMS) is a diversity initiate to help women in tech to integrate into business through a series of workshops, training’s and business communication. This follows the model of classroom based learning facilitated by Amazon leaders and spans over 4 classroom sessions over a course of 24 weeks.  Each session is of 4-6 hours duration. Along with these sessions, students are grouped and assigned a small project to give them an opportunity to apply the learning. Mentoring is one the key factors and each group is assigned a mentor. These mentors work with their respective groups for the entire duration and help the students in completing their assigned projects. 

Amazon came to our campus and conducted the first round of selection on 25th January 2020, where 8 students were selected fir the mentorship. 

Once the mentorship started we got to visit the Amazon Hyderabad Campus and have the first face to face session in the February of 2020.  Although other sessions were to be carried out in a similar fashion, due to the pandemic, our face to face sessions were carried out online on Amazon Chime. In these sessions we learned topics such as Functional programming, OOPs concepts, Machine learning introduction, Problem solving, Data structures, Amazon leadership principles etc. 

In the April of 2020, we were assigned our teams( 8 girls from our college were made into 2 teams. Students of previous years were assigned teams randomly ) and our mentor made contact with us for the first time and notified us about the project. We were given around 45 days to complete the project during which our mentor was always available to clear our doubts and suggest new ways to approach the problem. It was a huge learning experience.

Our mentor also conducted mock interviews and weekly meeting to track our progress about the project and train us for the upcoming interviews and gave us tips to improve ourselves.

Our final face to face session was scheduled in mid July. Where we were informed that our interviews would be scheduled in July. 

Our interviews were conducted on Amazon Chime and a live coding platform. After a month of the interviews we were given our results, where 6 out of the 8 students have secured an intern position at Amazon.

Interview Experience:

First Round:

The questions were on the easy side.

• MCQs about C (find error, find output etc.)
• 2 programming questions ( learn standard Dynamic Programming questions)

SDE Interviews:

First Interview: ( 1 hour interview. 2 questions apart from “Introduce yourself”)

1. Given a sorted array whose size is unknown find the number of times a given element occurs.
2. Given an array find the shortest subarray to delete such that the remaining array in non decreasing order.

Second Interview: ( 1 hour interview (same day). 2 questions apart from “Introduce yourself”)

1. Assume a binary tree with a mirror passing vertically through the root node. Given a node on the tree. find which node would become it’s reflection.
2. Given an array of stock prices. Find the maximum profit one can make by buying and selling any number of times. But you cannot sell before you buy.

Practice carefully and do not get nervous in your interviews. Never be afraid to ask your interviewer doubts or hints. For each question you should be able to give a proper time and space complexity analysis  for every solution you propose.

All the best for your interview preparation.