There were totally 4 rounds (1 Online Assessment + 3 Technical Interviews)
Round 1 (Online Assessment): The Interviews were conducted on the Amazon Chime platform.
Coding questions were asked to code on Amazon’s LiveCode platform. Each interview round was approx. 1 hr each.
It had 3 sections:
- Coding Assessment: coding section using C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Kotlin, Objective C, Python, Ruby, Scala, or Swift (70 minutes).
- SDE Work Simulation: The work simulation is an interactive video simulation of a day in the life of an SDE at Amazon. (120 minutes )
- Workstyles Assessment: This is built around Amazon’s Leadership Principles (10-15 minutes)
In the coding round, there were 2 coding questions of Easy level difficulty.
Round 2 (Technical Interview):
- Almost the same as https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/find-itinerary-from-a-given-list-of-tickets/amp/ with O(n) approach
- Multi-source BFS problem similar to: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-time-required-so-that-all-oranges-become-rotten/amp/
Round 3 (Technical Interview):
- Remove K duplicate elements: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/reduce-the-string-by-removing-k-consecutive-identical-characters/amp/ – I gave stack approach in O(n), She was satisfied with the solution.
- https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/minimum-cost-to-merge-numbers-from-1-to-n/amp/
Round 4 (Technical Interview):
There was a lot of discussion on this problem and the reasoning for why my solution works. The interviewer was quite supportive and was satisfied with my approach (using prefix min. and suffix max. arrays).
- He asked me a medium-difficulty question in the end as the first question took a lot of time: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/median-of-stream-of-integers-running-integers/amp/
I came up with the solution quickly but could have written even simpler code with the same logic. Then he asked a few behavioral questions based on Amazon’s Leadership Principles like:
- Tell me a situation where you have to do a quick fix and know it’s not the best approach.
- Tell me a situation when you took leadership of your team. and a few more.
PS: I don’t remember behavioral questions exactly. I have prepared a couple of good experiences from my internships for answering them.
Tips:
- Communication is very important, Don’t stay silent and keep your interviewer in sync both with your approach and with the code you are writing.
- If you propose a new approach, make sure you have reasoning for why it is better than the previous one.
- Start with the Brute Force Approach. It’s completely fine to take a few minutes to think of the optimal solution, but make sure to tell your interviewer the same (that you need a few minutes to think).
- Be open-minded and try to grab the hints given by the interviewer.
- Be clear with Time and Space complexity as almost all the time you need to explain them for your approach.
Verdict: Selected