Amazon SDE-1 Interview Experience- 2022. Off-campus | Discussions & more.
I had applied at Amazon several times. Both through amazon job portal and through referrals but never got the test link for months.
One fine day I finally got the mail. In it was the amazon test link and a sweet deadline.
As the next step, we’d like to invite you to complete this online exercise no later than a week from now.
Round 1: Online Coding Assessment
There were two coding questions. None of them were standard, so I couldn’t exactly paste the question link here.
1st question was based on Hashmap(medium level). I was able to solve it.
2nd question was based on Graph/Grids(Hard level). Few test cases did not pass.
Round 2: Technical Interview R-1
I was glad I got the call for the interview. It started with a brief introduction. Since I was already working in a company, she asked about my experience there, the tech stack I was working on and why I wanted to leave the current company.
Interview proceeded and I got the first question to solve.
Question-1: Minimum Window Substring (https://leetcode.com/problems/minimum-window-substring/)
Round one, first question, leetcode hard. I was dumbstruck. There are few question that you leave for solving later, probably in peace. And you never get that peace to solve it. It was one of them.
Still I did not let that reflect on my face as I had faced this situation in other interview and had completely screwed it. But not this time.
I asked the interviewer if I could take some time to think and then came up with a brute force approach. She seemed quite impressed with the approach and asked me to code it. I was relaxed since she didn’t ask me to optimise it further. I coded it down and she moved on to next question.
Question-2: Subset Sum Problem(https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/subset-sum-problem-dp-25/).
It was pretty straightforward. I took some time and explained the solution using bottom-up DP. She was convinced with the approach and asked me to code it.
Round 3: Technical Interview R-2
The interview started with Introduction. I told him that I’m currently working in XXX(not sure if I should reveal it here) for last seven months and primarily working on React Native. He gave me an option to either move forward with DSA questions first or more into the work I’ve done in my Org.
I said diving deep into my past projects will make me more comfortable. But you can ask either.
We went on to discuss the projects. I was discussing about the substring logic that I’d implemented for my company. It struck him. He said you seem confident in substrings, lemme ask you a question based on it.
To my surprise, he asked the same Minimum Window Substring problem that was asked in 1st Technical round. This time he enforced that I should solve it in O(n) time complexity.
I had not solved it optimally after the first interview. I was regretting. I looked at the fan. Tried to calm myself down and started solving the problem.
Thankfully, with few hints from the Interviewer I was able to solve it in remaining time.
Round 4: Bar Raiser Round
This was the last interview round. The interviewer introduced himself and asked me to introduce myself as well. He was SDEM with some 10–12 years of experience.
I introduced myself. Then he started throwing Amazon Leadership Principle questions. Here’s some questions that I remember:
Tell me about a time, you worked on something and it didn’t go well. How did you handle it?
What was the best and worst project you worked on.
Few other, “Given a situation, how would you handle it” type questions.
He then asked to explain any one of my projects. I started explaining how I had worked on decreasing the startup time of the App. The discussion went for about 15 minutes. He then asked me one DSA problem, which is:
Design a stack that supports push(), pop() & getMin() in O(1) time
I was able to solve it within 20 minutes and in remaining time we discussed about the culture at Amazon, his experience and the projects he was working on.
After few days, HR called me to congratulate on the offer 🎉
Thank you!
