Amazon ACMS Interview Experience | SDE Intern

ACMS is Amazon Campus Mentorship Series for women in Tech. Amazon visits a few colleges to select a few students for this program by conducting an online exam.

Selection process: Amazon conducted a test to shortlist the students for the mentorship program. The test had around 23 MCQ’s and 2 coding questions. MCQ’s were quite simple. They covered Programming languages, DBMS, and few topics of OS.

The coding questions were simple too. One was the Coin Change problem (Minimum number of coins). I don’t remember the other one but it was quite simple too.

The results were declared exactly after 15 days of the test.

Mentorship Program – Sessions: After Amazon shortlisted few students for mentorship, we had various sessions on Object-Oriented Principles, Amazon Leadership Principles, Data Structures and Algorithms, Databases, etc. There were 4 sessions one every month(almost) from February.  After the first session, we were divided into a team of 5 and were assigned a mentor.  

We were informed about the interviews in our last sessions and were asked to prepare all the CS topics. After our final session, we had a mock interview with our mentor where our mentor wanted to give explanations to us how interviews are done at Amazon. The mock interview was quite helpful to prepare for the original interviews.

Mentorship Program – Team division and project: The team division was random. We had a call almost every 2 weeks with our mentor, and we were working on a project decided by our mentor. The main aim of the project was to check if we’re a team player and the technologies we know etc. Since it was the COVID season, the only first session was offline at the campus in Hyderabad. All the other sessions including the meetings with mentors were virtual.

We were given a month to complete the project. So the work division and the presentations were done accordingly. This gave us an experience of how projects are done at Amazon. The entire project was divided into 5 parts which were database designing, backend connectivity, 2 separate features, and front end. I worked on the front end of the project.

Later in the last week, we were asked individually to integrate the project and were asked questions on the integration of the project in the mock interview.

Mock Interview: Since the interviewer was my mentor itself, he directly started asking me a coding question and asked me to optimise as much as possible. The question was a basic problem on arrays:  

• Given an array arr[] of n integers, construct a Product Array prod[] (of the same size) such that prod[i] is equal to the product of all the elements of arr[] except arr[i]. 

He then asked me not to use the division operator and asked me to modify as much as possible. After that, he asked me to add a feature to the project we did and asked me to code for the feature and make necessary changes. This was just for him to get an idea about us since the sessions weren’t offline, they had to conduct a mock interview individually to check our performance.

Interview Round 1: The interviewer asked me a question on strings. The question was quite simple.

• Given a string s with opening and closing brackets (parentheses), the number of parentheses to be removed to make it a valid string.
• I was asked to print the valid strings. I was asked to optimise as much as possible but since it was a timed interview for 1 hour, I couldn’t code the entire thing.

Interview Round 2:

The interviewer started by asking me about myself and my ACMS experience and then he started asking coding questions. The question was similar to the Two Sum problems from leetcode.

https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/

The questions were simple and straight forward. If you’re stuck anywhere make sure to ask the interviewer for hints. They will surely help you out.