Amazon Interview Experience for SDE-1(On-Campus)

Last Updated : 06 Sep, 2022

Hi. I am a Final Year student of B. Tech in Information Technology at NIT Kurukshetra. Amazon visited our college to hire SDE-1 on 8th August 2022 and after the pre-placement talk, 300+ students gave the Online Assessment.

Online Assessment: Online assessment had 3 sections :

Coding Questions: There were 2 easy questions. I don’t remember the questions exactly but both were simple array questions in both questions I had to use prefix sum/ suffix sum array and some other simple calculations were there.
Tip: Even if a question seems simple try reading it properly, and look at the test case and constraints to save time.
Work Simulation: In this section, we were given a dummy setup of a work profile in which we can receive emails and chats, etc. from dummy colleges and questions based on situations simulating actual work.
Work Assessment: In this section, there were behavioral MCQs. It was very long and the key is to the patient while answering not rushing and being honest.

After online assessment results came very late on 30th August 2022, and 80 students were selected for interviews.

Round 1 Interview: My round1 of the interview was on 1st Sept 2022 on Amazon Chime and we were using Amazon Live Editor for writing code. We started with his introduction and then mine. Then gave me two DSA questions that were:

Minimum Platforms: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/minimum-platforms-1587115620/1
Next Larger Node in BST: https://shengqianliu.me/tree-data-structure/next-greater-number-bs

I was told to explain my logic and intuition in an optimized manner, then code on Live Editor and then tell about its Time and Space Complexity.

Tip: Think out loud, Ask questions about the problem and If you have doubts don’t assume anything if the interviewer has not mentioned it.

Then I was asked some leadership principles-based questions and their follow-ups:

Tell me about a time when you had to do extra work beyond your role and how it helped.

Then I asked these questions at the end to the interviewer:

How is the work-life balance and amazon?
How much ownership do we get in a project?

Round 2 Interview: Round 2 of the interview was on 2nd Sept 2022. The discussion started with a quick introduction and then we talked about my internships. Like what was the project, tech stack, outcomes, etc. I had worked on AWS in my internship so I was asked what services I used, where I used them, and what steps I have taken to configure those services. There were many follow-up questions that I don’t remember exactly.

Then we started with the coding questions, which were:

Reverse Words in Given String: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/reverse-words-in-a-given-string5459/1
Add 1 to a number represented as a linked list: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/add-1-to-a-number-represented-as-linked-list/1

Again I was told to explain my logic and intuition in an optimized manner, then code on Live Editor and then tell about its Time and Space Complexity.

He also asked some conceptual questions like:

Name the data structures you know about and which is your favorite.
Difference between tree and graph
Difference between array and linked list.
Situations when you will use a linked list or array.

Then I asked this question at the end to the interviewer:

What is the daily routine for an SDE at amazon?

Round 3 Interview: My round3 was on 2nd Sept 2022 after a few hours of the second round. This round was taken by 3 interviewers. First, we started with introductions, and then I was asked about my internships. After that, some leadership principles questions were there with many follow-up questions. The questions were

Tell me about a time when you had to face a tight deadline
Have you neglected efficiency or some cases due to deadline
Have faced an issue where you were using extra resources (like space and time complexity-wise) in your project how did you deal with it?
etc.

Then we started with coding questions which were: