Amazon Interview Experience for SDE Internship (On-Campus) 2022

The hiring process consisted of 3 rounds :

• Online assessment Round
• Technical Interview Round 1
• Technical Interview Round 2

Online Assessment Round: The assessment consisted of four components:

A Code Debugging Section (20 minutes): This round was comprised of 7 debugging questions that required some minor changes to the already given code. this round was the easiest.

A Coding Test (70 minutes): This round was comprised of 2 DSA coding questions.

• Question 1 – Given a truck space unit T and a list of products space units numbered 1 – N. find out exactly two products x and y that fit into the truck also implement an internal rule that k units of space should be reserved for future use.
• Question 2 – Given a list of items, where each item has its (name, relevance, and price ) after sorting the elements by (name: 0, relevance: 1, and price: 2 ) the programmer tries to find out a list of items displayed on a given page. Given a list of items, the sort column, the sort order (0: ascending, 1: descending), the number of items to be displayed in each page, and a page number, write an algorithm to determine the list of item names in the specified page while respecting the item’s order (Page number starts at 0).

A Workstyles Assessment (20 minutes): This is an important part of amazon’s hiring process and most of the students often ignore the importance of this section

one should read and apply The 14 LEADERSHIP PRINCIPLES (https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles) of Amazon to answer these questions.

Questions were mostly situation based for eg – do you prefer working alone or in a team? etc.

A Reasoning Ability Section (35 minutes): This round consisted of around 20 Aptitude type Multiple choice questions with single correct answer. all the MCQs were of medium – hard category.

The results were announced after a month of online assessment, Around 1000 students appeared for the Online Assessment Round and 140 were shortlisted for the interview process.

Technical Interview Round 1(45 minutes): We were provided an amazon chime link for the meeting. First of all, the interviewer introduced herself and asked me to introduce myself. Then she asked me to describe my projects the discussion took 5 minutes and then we quickly jumped to the coding questions.

The Question was similar to https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/reduce-the-string-by-removing-k-consecutive-identical-characters/

we had to do this in O(n) Time and O(1) Space.

For eg.

String - "aabbbcddc"
ouput - "bbb"

it was a long discussion and after she was satisfied with the approach I was asked to write a fully functional code of the problem.

since we were left with only 5 minutes she asked me if I had a question for her and the interview ended.

Technical Interview Round 2 (50 minutes): After around 1 hour of round 1, I received a link for the 2nd technical round. The interview started again the interviewer introduced himself and asked me to introduce myself. Then he asked me to describe my internship work and one of my project the discussion took 15 minutes and then we jumped to the coding questions.

I was asked two questions completely based on DSA.

Question 1: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/boolean-parenthesization-problem-dp-37/. i was asked to solve the above problem in the most optimal way i started with the bruteforce solution and we discussed the optimisations until the interviewer was fully satisfied and then he asked me to write a fully executable code

Question 2: Given a list “ORDERS [ ]” of strings type, consisting the names of people representing an order by person named ORDERS[i]. highest priority is given to a person who has more number of orders, find k most valued customers and if two people have same number of orders then priority is decided on the basis of Lexicographical order i.e the name that has lower lexicographic order occurs first.

i was asked to do it in O(n) time and O(n) space i started with the bruteforce solution and we discussed the optimisations until the interviewer was fully satisfied and then he asked me to write a fully executable code

for eg.

Input :
ORDERS = {"xy","yz","xy","zz","yz","xy","zz","yz","xy"}
k=2
Output :
{"xy" , "yz"} 

The interview ended after a discussion on the work culture at amazon.

The Results were announced after 5 days and 25 people were selected for the SDE internship and i was one among them:

Most important topics to prepare for amazon are:

• Trees (both N-ary trees and binary trees)
• Dynamic Programming
• Heaps
• Graphs
• Stack and Queue

TIPS FOR PREPARATION:

• Start solving medium-level leetcode problems as soon as possible.
• Refer love babbar’s 450 DSA sheet it contains nearly all major interview problems. (https://dotodsa.netlify.app/) try solving on this platform.
• Do not solve problems of same type instead just read out the solution of a similar problem so that you can revise previous concepts again.
• Try to provide as much optimal solution as possible for each problem you solve while practicing.
• Cramming Amazon or XYZ company-tagged questions won’t be sufficient. the aim should be to practice enough questions to develop your coding abilities and become able to tackle a completely new problem
• Be comfortable with calculating the time and space complexities of your program.
• Last and most important tip is “try to maintain notes of all the questions you have solved, just jot down all the concepts needed to solve that problem” believe me it will help a lot.