Amazon Interview Experience for SDE-1

Round 1(Online):

The online round comprised of two DS and Algo-based problem where two things are required for each problem.

1. Executable, Bug-free, and clean code (As the code will be tested on public and private testcases).
2. Explanation of your solution and the complexity of the solution.

Duration: 2 hours

• Both the problems were leetcode medium level (BFS/DFS in 2d matrix and sorting based problems).
• Suggestion:- STL functions are used extensively for those problems and traversing algorithm is also a must. Try writing clean and well-documented code.

Round 2(F2F Technical Interview Round-1)

1. First, the interviewer discussed previous work experience and college projects. Also asked some counter questions on it.
2. Questions on leadership principles.
3. DS-Algo medium level question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/boundary-traversal-of-binary-tree/1
4. DS-Algo medium level question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/reorder-list/1

Suggestion:- 

• Don’t directly jump to code, first explain brute force approach and after discussing how you can optimize it, you can start coding.

Round 3(F2F Managerial Round): This round is taken by software development manager at amazon. 

1. As usual, interview started with my previous work experience and projects I worked on previously. Around 20 minutes discussed previous work and project. Some counter questions like why you implemented x thing in your project, what are some tradeoffs were asked.
2. Another 15/20 minutes revolved around answering questions on leadership principles.(Prepare for these questions before hand so that you don’t take much time in thinking about the story which you want to plot).
3. For rest of the interview questions revolved around CS fundamentals based questions. (Mostly about multithreading, deadlocks, OOP concepts, shared memory etc). Also some questions is asked where code snippet is given and output is asked(code was in java).

Round 4(F2F Technical Interview Round-2): This round is pretty much similar to first technical interview. The only difference is questions asked less on previous work and more on CS fundamentals, but rest is same.

1. Interviewer asked questions on my work at previous organisation and projects.
2. Some questions on hashing, BFS/DFS tradeoffs and sorting.
3. Questions on leadership principles.
4. DS-Algo easy-medium level question: https://practice.geeksforgeeks.org/problem-page.php?pid=701884
5. DS-Algo easy-medium level question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/multiply-two-strings/1

Round 5(F2F Bar raiser): This round was also similar to other technical interviews only the difference is interviewer was more interested in knowing my previous experience, projects and leadership principle. Plenty of leadership principle-based questions were asked in this round and once he got satisfied we moved on to a DS algo based problem. 

1. Problem:- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/multiply-large-integers-under-large-modulo/ (Logarithmic approach was expected)

Suggestion:- 

• Don’t panic in bar raiser beacuse if you have came to this round then their must be some potential they have seen in your previous rounds.
• Take this as another technical interview with more focus on leadership principles. Also i think bar raiser has more weightage then any other rounds so if you can done well in this round you will probably get the offer.

Be calm & answer politely.

All the best!

Verdict: Accepted.