SDE 1 at Amazon

How it went

What they would tell you

How to prepare

Their background

Round by round

1. 1

   Online Assessment60 min

   Nothing out of the ordinary here, pretty standard Amazon online assessment. There were two coding problems, both fairly straightforward if you’ve spent some time practicing data structures and algorithms. The first one involved finding an optimal path in a matrix, and the second was about string manipulation. The work simulation part was actually kind of interesting. They give you a bunch of workplace scenarios where you have to make decisions, things like prioritizing tasks or handling team dynamics. I just went with what felt natural and how I’d genuinely respond in those situations. Wrapped everything up with about 10 minutes to spare. Felt good about both coding solutions, and the debugging questions were easier than I expected.

2. 2

   Technical Interview 160 min

   First live interview, interviewer was this senior engineer who seemed pretty laid back. Threw me a line sweep problem right off the bat. I've seen these before so I jumped straight into explaining the approach. Got the solution working in about 25 minutes. Then came the behavioural stuff. He asked about "Customer Obsession" and I talked about this time I stayed late to fix a critical bug that was affecting our users. Seemed to resonate well with him. The technical discussion was solid. We went deep into time complexity and he asked some follow-up questions about handling edge cases. Overall felt like a good conversation between engineers.

3. 3

   Technical Interview 260 min

   Started with a stack problem that I solved quickly, then moved to this modified topological sort that had me scratching my head for a bit. The twist was that you had to handle cycles in a specific way, which wasn't immediately obvious. Took me about 15 minutes to figure out the modification needed. Once I got it, the implementation was smooth. Behavioural questions focused on "Bias for Action". I shared a story about taking initiative to refactor some legacy code without being asked. The interviewer appreciated the proactive approach.

   • Topological sort or Kahn's algorithm
4. 4

   Bar Raiser Round60 min

   The bar raiser round was definitely the toughest, but also felt fair. The interviewer was clearly very experienced, sharp, to the point, and asked some really focused questions. The coding part was a mix of trees and dynamic programming. Nothing completely unfamiliar, but the follow-up questions were nonstop. Stuff like: “What if the tree is unbalanced?”, “How would you handle memory constraints?”, “Can you optimize this further?” It was clear they were testing how deeply I understood my own solution and how I think on my feet.

5. 5

   Hiring Manager Round60 min

   Most relaxed round by far. HM was genuinely interested in understanding my background and motivations. We talked about the team's projects, they're working on some interesting distributed systems challenges in the logistics space. No coding, but we had a good technical chat about system design principles. I mentioned some scalability issues I'd dealt with at my current job, and we discussed different approaches to solve them. The conversation felt natural and I got a good sense of what the day-to-day work would be like. HM seemed enthusiastic about bringing me on board.

What came up