Amazon Interview Experience for System Development Engineer (Exp – 6 months)

Round 1 (Phone Screening): It was a screening round to gauge my resume and also check if I was worth the further interview process for the role. The interviewer started with a basic introduction followed by some questions on the projects mentioned on my resume. Post that, I was asked a few coding questions mentioned below:

1. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/boundary-traversal-of-binary-tree/1
2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/problems/add-1-to-a-number-represented-as-linked-list/1 

It was followed by a trouble-shooting question: What will you do if your website is unable to fetch the data from your SQL database?

Round 2 (Tech Round 1): This was the first Technical Round and after a quick exchange of introduction, the interviewer straight away dived into some coding questions:

1. https://leetcode.com/problems/best-time-to-buy-and-sell-stock-ii/ (further modifications were made and was asked how different my approach would be)
2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/search-an-element-in-a-sorted-and-pivoted-array/

Then I was asked some questions on OOP and DBMS concepts. One question which stood out in the interview was to compare how similar/different would the structure of a class be when compared with an entity from the ER Model.

This round ended with a behavioral question based on ownership & customer obsession:

Mention a time when you went above and beyond what was required of you at work?

Round 3 (Hiring Manager): The interviewer started with a quick introduction and asked numerous things about all the technologies and projects that were mentioned on my resume. Then we started with the coding questions:

1. Sort alphabets in such a way that all the alphabets which are more than 1 in number in the given array appear first with their frequency of alphabets to follow and all those alphabets that are single appear at the end in the same order of their appearance. eg: {b, f, a, c, g, a, f, b, b, d} -> {b, b, b, f, f, a, a, c, g, d}
2. Find any subsequence from an array whose sum is zero (The array contains both positive & negative numbers)

Then it was time for some behavioral questions:

1. Tell me about the coolest thing that you have done so far.
2. Tell me about a time you had to do some work under a strict timeline and did not have the time to consider all the options.
3. Tell me about a time when you had a difficult problem to solve.

Round 4 (Tech Round 2): This was the second technical round and after a brief introduction the interviewer directly stepped into some coding questions:

1. A modified version of https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/check-balanced-parentheses-expression-o1-space/
2. https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/

This was followed by a troubleshooting question: What would you do if the webpage that you are currently on blacks out? This was more of something like a discussion with each of the answers I say leading to a new question.

This was followed by a behavioral question:

1. Tell me about a time when you had to do a lot of research to get your work done.

Round 5 (Bar Raiser): A bar raiser is typically your make or breaks as per Amazon. The interviewer here will have a veto at the time of debrief whether to not select you. The bar raiser generally is on various Amazon LP and will also check on your weak topics from your earlier rounds. My interview majorly comprised of some behavioral questions and a healthy discussion about my resume.

1. Mention a time when you had to react quickly in your work. What was the outcome?
2. Mention when you had to dive deep into something to get your work done. I had answered based on a college experience of mine & then the interviewer asked me to think of something that I had done during my work experience as well.
3. Talk about a time when you had taken a challenging project. What was the challenge and how did you overcome it.

After 2 days I got an email from my recruiter telling me that I had qualified the interviews.

Some tips:

1. Be honest with your interviewer and do not mention anything that you do not know on your resume.
2. Prepare some real-life scenarios for every Amazon LP that is there. It will always help you to make note of all the scenarios from your work experience and build a story out of it.
3. Make it a point to clarify the question once asked and also state all your assumptions well in advance.