← Interview experiences
Got the offer

SDE-1 at Amazon

Difficulty
Process took
6+ Weeks
Rounds
4
Format
Remote
Applied via
Other

How it went

  • Stay patient, keep the faith, and believe in your efforts, success often arrives quietly

What they would tell you

  • Stay patient, keep the faith, and believe in your efforts, success often arrives quietly

How to prepare

  • When there's a gap between interview rounds, make the most of it, brush up on recently asked questions and patterns. Staying updated can give you an edge in the next round.

Their background

I'm excited to share that I recently had the opportunity to interview at Amazon for the SDE-1 role and I'm happy to say that I’ve received the offer! 🙌 🎓 Graduation Year: 2023 🏫 College: Tier-2 Institute 💼 Experience: 1 year 10 months 🏢 Current Role: Working at a service-based MNC

Round by round

  1. 1

    OA60 min

    The interview consisted of 2 DSA questions along with a behavioral round that focused on past experiences, ownership, and problem-solving mindset. The DSA questions I was asked were:

    • Top K Frequent Elements
    • Find the First Unique Character in a String
  2. 2

    TR 160 min

    Two SDE-1s interviewed me and gave me two DSA problems: Reschedule Meetings for Maximum Free Time I and Meeting Rooms II.

  3. 3

    TR 260 min

    In this round, I was interviewed by two SDE-2s who gave me a mix of challenging and standard problems. I was asked to solve Word Ladder || , Count Beautiful Splits in the Array, followed by two standard low-level problems an 2 LP problem. Overall, I found this round to be quite diverse in nature. Fortunately, I had prepared well for such problems, so I was able to confidently code the most optimal solution for Word Ladder. For the second problem, I could discuss a partial approach.

  4. 4

    TR 3 (Bar Raiser)60 min

    This round was taken by a very experienced Amazon engineer with over 13 years at the company. It was a bit more formal compared to the previous rounds, and the interaction felt a little distant. The round started with a DSA problem that was similar to Unique Paths ||. Given a start and end point in a grid, the task was to find the maximum points the robot could collect by moving only right or down. I walked through a recursive solution first and then optimized it using memoization, including a discussion on the time and space complexity. Although I’m usually someone who explains my thoughts as I code, the interviewer preferred that I remain silent until the code was done, which challenged me to adjust on the fly. After the coding, we moved on to LP questions like:

    • What’s one thing you’re not good at?
    • How do you approach learning new technologies?
    • Describe your most challenging project

What came up

MediumRemote1 2 years

A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.

Sources