I applied for SDE1 on the Amazon job portal. After few days, I got an exam link from Amazon. In the exam, there were 2 coding questions(DP, Greedy) and 2 descriptive questions in which we have to explain how we approached the above 2 questions and write about their time and space complexities.
After few months, I got an Amazon Interview preparation call, in which they explained the whole interview process.
Interview Round 1: The interviewer was SDE2 and made me comfortable by telling about himself and asking about myself. Then he asked about my projects, it was a long discussion and took 25 mins.
- Then he asked a coding question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/boggle-set-2-using-trie/. I first told him the DFS approach and then optimized using trie. We discussed all the edge cases and time complexity. He seemed impressed by my approach.
I had the next interview scheduled just after this.
Interview Round 2: The interviewer was SDE2 and she directly started with coding questions.
- The first question was: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/search-in-a-rotated-array4618/1. I started with brute force and the explained O(nlogn) solution using Binary search. After some, I told her the O(n) approach.
- The second question was: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/search-in-a-matrix17201720/1. I solved it using binary search.
After few weeks my next rounds got scheduled.
Interview Round 3: The interviewer started with a briefing about himself and then asked about myself.
- Then he asked, have you ever faced a problem with a deadline?
- Then asked the question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimize-cash-flow-among-given-set-friends-borrowed-money/amp/. I haven’t seen this question before, so I took 4-5 mins to think. Then I explained to him my approach using DFS and bottle-neck. We discussed all the edge cases and time and space complexities. Although its preferred approach is greedy, I was able to do it in the same time complexity using DFS. He was happy with my solution.
Round 4 was scheduled the next day.
Interview Round 4:
- The interview started with the coding question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/add-two-numbers-represented-by-linked-lists/1 He said don’t modify the input, so I used recursion with some conditions. He was impressed with the solution.
- Then he asked another question: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/print-a-binary-tree-in-vertical-order/1. I explained the approach using preorder traversal, then he said it will give a wrong answer for some cases so I used level order traversal. He also asked me to tell efficient and optimized data structure for this problem.
- Have you ever learnt something on your own.
- On what technology do you want to work.
Then he said we will let you know in 7 days.
After 7 days I got a call from HR that you got selected.
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