Amazon Interview Experience for SDE Intern

Round 1: Offline OT was conducted in our campus(NIT)

Round 2: Technical interview (online)

Description of Online Test :

The OT was offline and was conducted in our labs.

1st question was of easy difficulty in which we had to sort the array of pairs in ascending order using a comparator

I passed all the test cases(15/15)

I don’t exactly remember the 2nd question but it was of medium – hard difficulty in which

I had passed 10/15 test cases.

I solved it using brute force approach and did some modifications to the code and made 10 test cases pass.

At last, we had a leadership principles test in which I was given different scenarios and was asked to choose what my response would be to that particular situation. We have to select the options based on Amazon’s leadership principles:https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles

I think they took this leadership test score seriously because many of my friends who passed all the test cases weren’t selected for the next round. So that’s how important the leadership principles are to them!

Description of Technical interview :

I do not remember the exact questions of my interview but 2 DSA questions were asked.

The interview was held online and there were 2 people in the interview. One was the main interviewer who asked the questions and the other was observing how the interview was going.

The interviewer was very friendly.

The first question was a question based on a binary search. It was of easy-medium difficulty. He asked me to write the code in the code editor and run it for the test cases he provided. Once I had written my code he checked it with different test cases he had in his mind and approved my code. We moved on to the next question.

He started telling me the 2nd question and I took almost 10-20 mins to think about how to solve the question. As I said, he was very friendly and asked me whether I needed a hint. He was explaining the question again (more clearly now) and I immediately got the idea of how to solve the question. It was again a binary search question but with a lot of modifications made to it. It was hard to notice the question was a binary search model question, but the interviewer was supportive and was pushing me to get the solution. I wrote the code in 15 minutes considering all the edge cases and I explained my code to him. He was happy with my code. Another 5 minutes were left so he asked me another question based on memory allocation of vectors. I concluded the interview by thanking him.

Final Verdict: I got selected

What should be the preparation strategy for an aspiring candidate?

Practice as much DSA as possible.

After giving interviews for big companies( Microsoft, DE Shaw, Amazon ) I clearly understood that the more you know DSA and how quickly u get the idea for a given problem statement will determine how smooth your interview goes.

So that’s how important DSA is.

Resources for Preparation:

Practice on leetcode (also participate in contests), interview bit , GFG.

Youtube: I followed striver mainly for dp, graphs and some other concepts

GFG: for STL syntax, Concepts, and also some problems.