I had applied at careers portal of Amazon for SDE 1 role. The whole process took around 2 months from Application to offer letter.
The process consisted of three stages.
Online Assessment
Technical Interviews
Bar Riser
Online Assessment ( 2 hours )
It had two coding questions (Leetcode medium). Don't remember the questions.
Along with solving the problem, approaches for both the problems were also to be provided with time and space complexities too.
I was informed in 2 days that I have been selected for Technical Interviews. I was asked about basic details like current location, preferred location, and date of availibility for Interviews. I gave them a date after 15 days so that I could prepare for the interviews.
Technical Round 1: Coding ( 1 hour )
This was a coding round. Interviewer was an SDE 2 in amazon.
I was asked 2 coding questions. The first one was a variant of multisource BFS. First I told him the approach he was satisfied with that approach then i started writing the code. In the end explained him the Time and Space complexity.
Second question was similar to the palindrom partitioning problem. As i had already solved this question, I first told him the naive approach and then the optimal one and coded the solution in 10 minutes. Explaining the approach took me a little longer, and by the time I completed this question it was already 55 mins.
He just asked if i had any questions or not.
No LP questions in this round.
Technical Round 2: Coding and LP ( 1 hour ) (Next Day)
This round was taken by a Technical Program Manager. She had around 15 years of experience.
Q1: First Repeating Number in Array (Easy) : As this question was easy, I directly told her the optimal approach and coded the solution in 5 minutes.
Q2: Koko eating banana (Medium) : I was already familiar with this question, so again I told her the naive and optimal approach quickly and coded the solution in 10 mins.
Q3: Decode String (Medium) : I told her the recursive approach and then a bit of optimization. She was satisfied with the approach, and then i coded the solution.
The coding part took me around 45 mins and in the last 15 mins she asked 2 LP questions and asked if I had any questions.
Round 3: HM / Bar Raiser (1 hour)
After the second round, I was informed that the feedback was positive and that I would have to attend a Bar riser round the next day.
The interviewer was an SDM with 15+ years of experience.
Q1: Convert a given number to words: He just said this and no information was provided like the range of numbers, representation of words, so I asked various questions to him and once I got all the constraints, I told him the O(logn) approach. He was satisfied with it and told me to code it. After that, I told him about space and time complexity. He asked me to optimise the space complexity as I was using a map to store the strings for all the numbers till 100. So we gave me a hint to optimise space. In the end, he was satisfied with my solution.
It took me around 30 minutes to solve the question.
After that, he asked three LP questions:
Q1: A time when I had to work overtime due to close deadlines.
Q2: A time when I did some extra work that was not assigned to me.
Q3: A time when I had to learn something new to complete the assigned task.
At the end, he asked if I had some questions. I asked a few questions about the team and my role.
I received the results after a few days. My entire experience with the recruitment team at Amazon was amazing. The interview experience was also great. All the interviewers were super friendly.
A few preparation tips for someone who has interviews with Amazon coming up.
Amazon focuses a lot on LPs. So make sure you prepare for it a lot. Basically, don't bluff or make up a story on the fly. Be genuine.
I used the below article to prepare for LP questions.
https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/1905738/Amazon-or-Behavioural-Questions-or-Leadership-Principles-based-Questions-List-(Short-and-Concise)
Make sure your coding pace is really good, If you know the optimal solution, don't waste much time jumping to it. You have to understand the question , ask clarifying questions, write the entire code with little to no compilation errors, and then give the time and space complexity too.
For Compensation Details refer this post:
https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/2543043/Amazon-or-SDE-1-or-Fresher-or-Bangalore
If you liked the post please upvote :)