Amazon Interview Experience (On-Campus) 2022

Amazon visited my institute NIT Jamshedpur for FTE roles on July 22, 2022. Here is the breakdown of the whole process.

Online Assessment (OA 22/07/2022 – 23/07/2022): This was the first round and boy was this round tricky. We were given 2 easy-medium DSA questions to solve. They used basic implementation and not more than 10-12 lines of code. Easy right? No, the second part of the test was the Amazon values assessment where we were given many situation-based questions. They wanted to test our critical thinking and see how we will react in certain situations. Many people tried to be too good and were rejected, I always believed in these cases you just have to be yourself and I was myself and ultimately got through this round.  Since the coding questions were easy, the later section was the difference maker.

Interview Round 1 (05/08/2022): The interviews began on August 5 and everyone had to give 3 rounds of interviews. I was a little late for my first round since the info came in a little late but I eventually got in and the interview began. Firstly they asked me to give my intro and then introduced themselves. I had 2 interviewers, one was an SDE-II and the other was an SDE-I.  They asked me briefly about my summer internship and how I used AWS there. Then we moved to the Coding portion. I was asked total 3 questions in this round:

• 4Sum. Sounds easy but the interviewer wanted an O(n * n) time complexity solution which I gave him eventually after some effort.
• Word Search in a grid. This was a standard problem so no problems here. He was impressed when I did it with O(1) space.
• Vertical traversal of a tri-nary tree. Another standard problem.

Lastly, I was allowed to ask some questions and I asked about Amazon’s current plans and his work-life balance. For the first question, he said in a funny manner that they cannot reveal such info, and for the second he was pretty satisfied with his work-life balance but it is obviously a subjective thing.

Interview Round 2 (05/08/2022): The second round was a couple of hours after Round 1. The round was taken by an engineer who had 9 years of experience in the IT industry. He asked me about my intro and then introduced himself. Then we went into the coding section. I was asked 2 standard problems:

• A variation of the odd-even linked list problem in O(1) space complexity. I was able to do it quite easily and then we did a dry run.
• A variation of the number of islands problem. Again standard problem so no problems.

After this we had a nice discussion about my internship, he asked me about the problems I faced and how I overcame them. There was this funny incident that occurred, my third round interviewer joined during the discussion as I had consecutive interviews :(, he left immediately. Then I was given an opportunity to ask questions, I asked him about his daily routine at Amazon which he answered in quite detail.

Interview Round 3 (05/08/2022): This round started with a casual discussion about how I was allotted consecutive interviews. 

• The interviewer then introduced himself, he had an experience of 4 years working at Amazon. 
• Then we went into the coding section, I was only asked one problem this round.
• It was to create a deep clone of a linked list with random pointers. I gave him the hash-map-based approach and he was happy with it but asked me to improve it. 
• I knew what he wanted but still asked him even if we remove the hash-map the space complexity would be O(n) then what’s the point? 
• He explained that in a production environment creating such complex data structures can be costly and that’s why he wanted the improvement. It took me some effort but I figured it out in the end and coded it up really quickly.
• For the behavioral part of this round, he asked me about a time when I had to work on a strict deadline. I gave him an example from my internship and he was satisfied.
• As usual, I was given the chance to ask questions which I did. I asked him how do they make sure that all the sensitive data stays safe, he mostly explained about AWS and how they don’t have to really do anything since it is already pre-built.

Now after a month, the second list for the selects came and my name was on it. To be honest I had lost hope so it felt much better. All the interviewers were very friendly especially in the last round as I was asking some dubious questions but that’s one of the leadership principles of Amazon “Always ask questions” so I guess I wasn’t out of line :).