Interview Experience: Time Frame: Feb-April 2022
How did I Apply: Had received a mail from amazon regarding SDE-1 hiring and applied through the link in the mail which directed me to the amazon jobs portal.
OA Round 1 (22 Feb 2022): HackerRank. 2 Questions of medium difficulty level to be solved in 60 minutes. I had to write code as well as explain the approach.
- Big story was given which reduced to given an array of n numbers, reduce it to single integer following the pascal’s triangle pattern. It was a bit difficult to find this pattern but once realized it was easy to code.
- Another long story format question that required simple implementation of data structures.
After around 3 weeks I received a mail from HR asking for availability for an interview in next week.
Round 2 (23rd March 2022, duration- 1hr 15min, platform- Amazon Chime): This interview was taken by Sde-2 having 2.5 years of exp. He started by asking me to introduce myself and also introduced himself, then he pasted a question on the live code link text editor and we jumped on the coding questions:
- First ques was similar/ slight variation of- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-number-operation-required-convert-number-x-y/amp/
- Second ques- Hashing based array question.
I was asked to explain the optimized approach, write code for it and tell about space and time complexity. Gave a DFS solution but interviewer hinted for BFS approach and I got it. After giving BFS solution he further asked for any optimization and I optimized it with memoization. For the second ques we were running out of time so we directly jumped to a fully optimized approach and coded it.
Round 3 (Mid April, duration- 1hr, platform- Amazon Chime): This time there were two interviewers one with 2 yrs and the other one with 3 yrs of experience. They first asked for an introduction followed by questions on leadership principles. Then moved to coding questions:
- First question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/reverse-stack-without-using-extra-space/amp/
- Second question was a slight variation of- https://leetcode.com/problems/binary-search-tree-to-greater-sum-tree/
First ques took a bit of time but eventually, I solved them the way the interviewer wanted. For the second ques, it took me no time to solve in the best time-space complexity. After solving both the interviewer as questions based on leadership principles and the interviewer seemed quite happy with the interview.
Round 3 (Bar – raiser): This round didn’t happen Was told it would be scheduled in upcoming weeks but didn’t happen.