I had applied through Amazon Diversity Hiring Challenge for women at Hacker-earth.
Round 1: Online Coding Test
- There were two coding questions that had to be solved in 3 hours. I was able to solve one completely and one partially. After around a month, I received a mail from Amazon that I was shortlisted for the interview. My first two rounds of technical interviews were then scheduled after a week.
Round 2: Technical Interview 1
- The interviewer was SDE-2 at Amazon. The interview lasted for an hour.
- It started with a brief introduction. Then she directly moved to the coding questions:
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/print-all-subarrays-with-0-sum/amp/
- I solved this question using hashing.
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/rearrange-characters-string-no-two-adjacent/amp/
- I solved this question using a priority queue.
- Then she asked me two leadership questions:
- Tell me about a time when you had to make a decision under pressure to meet a deadline.
- Tell me about a time when something unexpected came up. How did you deal with the situation?
Round 3: Technical Interview 2
The interviewer was SDE-2 at Amazon. The interview lasted for an hour.
- It started with an introduction and then he asked me two coding questions. Given a set of mapping A->B, where A is getting infected with covid-19 through B. I had to tell who was the first person to start the infection. Eg, 2->3, 3->4, 5->6, 7->6, 6->1. So here 1 will be the answer. I solved this question using a set.
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maximum-product-subarray/amp/ I solved it in TC O(n) and SC O(1). Then he asked me to send him a write-up of any one project that I’ve worked on in my organization.
- Both the rounds were held on the same day and on the basis of the combined results of both the rounds, I was shortlisted for the third round that was scheduled after a week.
Round 4: Hiring Manager 1
- The interviewer was Senior SDM at Amazon. The interview lasted for an hour.
- It started with a brief introduction of the interviewer and then he discussed the project that he was working on. He then asked me to tell him something about myself. After that, he asked me to choose any one project that I have worked on at my current firm, and then we had a discussion on that for around 30 min.
- He then asked me to tell about a time when I had to choose between different options available and then decide which one works the best. I discussed one of the projects I did in college and the discussion lasted for around 20 minutes.
- Then, he asked some questions on core subjects: asked me to write one SQL query, OOPS concepts, and the difference between interface and abstraction.
After around 10 days, I got a call for the last round of interviews.
Round 5: Hiring Manager 2
The interviewer was SDM at Amazon. The interview lasted for an hour.
- The first coding question was: Given a chessboard where you are at the bottom left corner. Tell me the number of different ways to reach the top right corner. We had a discussion on edge cases. Then I gave a solution using BFS and he asked me to write the code for it, but that was best suited to find the smallest path. He told that the question will be solved using a greedy approach. Since I was not able to solve it completely, he switched to the next question.
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/search-an-element-in-a-sorted-and-pivoted-array/amp/ I solved this question using binary search and he was satisfied.
Then he asked one leadership question.
Verdict: Selected! After two days, I got a mail that I was selected.