Amazon Interview Experience for SDE-1

I was interviewed for the SDE-1 role at Amazon and I take this opportunity to share my experience.

Round 1: Coding Assessment:

• Before the technical rounds, I had to complete an online coding assessment (which was relatively easier by Amazon standard).
• Even though I completed this coding round in May, I wasn’t scheduled for an interview before the last week of August. I am not quite sure the reason behind such a delay.

Interview Call:

• I was informed about the dates 10 days prior to the interview and they sent me the meeting links (Amazon Chime and Livecode) 2-3 days before the interview.
• They also sent a mail describing their company principles, their expectation from an SDE, and tips and helpful links to prepare for the interview.
• They also confirmed my availability on the day of the interview over a call.

Round 2: Technical Round 1:

• The interviewer introduced himself by describing his role at Amazon before asking me “tell me something about yourself”.
• Then he asked a coding question: Given a sorted dictionary of an alien language, find the order of characters. He first wanted to know my approach before asking me to write a pseudo code.
• I did not know the GFG solution so I tried to solve it by myself. I came pretty close to the original solution, but it wasn’t fully accurate.
• The interviewer pointed out some cases where my code will not work and while doing so asked some technical questions related to it: mostly graph, tree, linked-list related.

Round 3: Technical Round 2:

• After one hour of the completion of the first round, the second round began. It started in a similar fashion with both of us introducing ourselves.
• The first coding question I was given was: Find the Maximum width of a binary tree. I was to present a pseudo-code first and once he liked my approach he immediately asked me to write the function.
• I wrote it and he suggested some improvements and then moved on to the next question: Find Next Greater Element.
• I solved it very quickly as I practiced it few days before the interview. He asked me about the time and space complexities of my solution.
• Once both of the coding questions were done, he asked me some behavioral questions as there were some times left.
• He asked if I want to mention any key event as my career highlight. Based on my answer he again asked some questions like what particular issue I found and how I went on to solve it (I probably should have told all the details, but I wanted to keep it short ).
• Finally, he asked me if I had any questions for him.

Unfortunately, I did not make it to the further managerial rounds, but it was a nice experience nonetheless and it boosted my confidence as I was able to answer 2/3 coding questions and I believe that I can surely improve by practicing more. I hope my experience can help other aspiring candidates in their preparation. Good Luck.