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

Online Assessment Test: This test consists of 4 sections. 

1. Debugging(There will be 7 problems and code. You have to debug that code(both logic and syntax).
2. 2 Coding questions (Medium level)
3. Behavioral (Very Important) – Most of the candidates thought this as a formality. Don’t do that, Amazon give importance to its leadership principles and values. Do read it once before test.
4. Mcqs – (Aptitude and Cs fundamentals)

There were 35 students selected for interviews.

Interview Round-1: After the introduction, he asked me 2 DSA questions.

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/program-to-count-number-of-connected-components-in-an-undirected-graph/
   I gave him 2 approaches. Firstly using normal DFS and second one using DSU data structures. He asked me to code it by second method.
2. Given an integer array of size n. Find number of ways to select a proper subsequence of size of K, such that it makes a number(basically subsequence shouldn’t start with 0 and it should be of size of K ). First I gave him the approach with simple math (select a index as starting of subsequence and calculate no of subsequence.). Then he asked me tell another approach. I came up with a DP solution. He asked me to code it and then asked me how to minimize the space complexity to linear.

This interview was at 12 am. Then I had to give 5 more interviews for Microsoft and Meesho. I got a call for 2nd round at around 8 am. 

Interview Round-2: After brief introduction, he asked me about my projects. After 5-10 mins discussion, he gave me 2 DSA questions.

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/duplicate-zeros/ . He was expecting a linear time and constant space complexity solution. Actually for these questions, if you don’t know the solution beforehand, it’s really hard to come up with all the optimizations. He actually gave me a hint and I was finally able to give the solution and code.
2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-steps-reach-target-knight/
   I gave him a straightforward BFS solution. He actually asked me jokingly that how many times I have solved this question before 🙂

Interview Round-3: I got a call straight after round 2 . It was my 8th interview of the night and I was completely exhausted.

• After the introduction, he asked me about my internship experience and we had a discussion about my work there and the tech stack I had previously worked on. Then he gave me a coding problem. It was a long problem and I took 4-5 mins just to understand the problem. Honestly I had no idea how to solve this. But I was telling my thought process to him. He jokingly said, he feels bad for me that after waking up whole night and after 7 interviews I had to solve this hard problem 🙁  Then he asked me another problem similarly to Subsequence/subarray with given sum And we had a discussion on this approach. Luckily he didn’t ask me to code it. He finally said that he got what he was looking for 🙂 🙂 

Selected!!

Later that evening I got to know that I was actually selected for all the 3 companies I had given interviews. I simply couldn’t believe it and was out of words. Honestly I don’t think I am extremely good at coding. But I had practiced a lot of problems on leetcode and GfG, I had decent knowledge of CS fundamentals (oops, OS, DBMS, CN). My suggestion for any candidates would be know about your projects(what have to used and why have you used it, what problems have you faced during it), solve a lot of problems, be confident. All the best guys. Work hard, good days are coming 🙂

Happy Coding!!!