I applied to Amazon for an SDE internship role -Berlin and received a test invitation(although I was later moved to Edinburgh, UK). The process included two sections, the test, and the interviews. There were three-phased coding tests and two personal interviews.
Coding Tests
Part I:
- This was a simple debugging round.
- It basically checks your command over general programming.
- If you are quick and clear on your concepts, this won’t be a hard nut to crack.
Part II:
- This one is a coding test, with medium to hard level coding questions.
- There were two questions to be solved in 45 minutes.
- One was to find the largest square in a grid, similar to https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/largest-square-formed-in-a-matrix0806/1
- In the second question, a log of strings was given and it was required to append strings with their frequency. For example, if the word orange appears twice, the first time would remain as such but the second one has to be made “orange(2)”. A simple hashmap-based approach would suffice for this solution, but there are other approaches you can come up with.
- My suggestion for this round would be to practice as many questions as you can, available on GeeksforGeeks and Leetcode.
Part III:
- This was an Amazon SDE simulation.
- It basically is a simulation of how you actually work under pressure and as a developer, in general, and checks your technical capability and decision-making skills as an SDE intern.
- If you’ve met the criteria of selection after this phase, you’ll receive an invitation for the interview. However, it could take a while. (I received mine after about two weeks 😉 )
Interviews
There were two personal interviews with technical as well as behavioral parts, both having a good amount of importance. Both interviews are about 45-60 minutes, with one coding question each.
- Given a maze with paths and walls, represented by strings, print whether or not there is a path from the topmost line to the bottommost line(row). This problem can be solved using a BFS approach, similar to This GFG article.
- Given customer logs and page transition logs as a list of class objects, identify the most common/frequent page transitions. This was a complex question to look at but could be solved using hashmaps if considered carefully.
Behavioral:
- For the behavioral part of the interviews, I would suggest taking the proper time to understand each of the 14 Leadership Principles of Amazon.
- Quickly catch up on your previous projects so you don’t get stuck if the interviewer asks about any.
Apart from that, some of the questions you could prepare for are
- Tell me about a time you helped someone.
- Tell me about a time you faced a group conflict.
- When was the time you faced a failure and what did you do to overcome it?
Lastly, I’d say no matter what the outcome is, you should give yourself a little treat for working so hard:)
Every challenge has only two things in its satchel – success or a lesson. Not everyone grabs the second, but those who do- WIN!