Background Details :
YOE - 1.5 years - 2018 batch
Position: SDE1 at Amazon
Location: Hyderabad , India
Round -1 (Online Assessment) :
There were 2 questions along with approach explanation sections.
You can expect LC Medium + Medium/Hard combination for the online assessment.
There is a 15 minutes dedicate slot in the online test where you have to explain your approach and the time and space complexities for each solution. Explained the same after submitting the solution.
Now received the mail that I cleared online assessment but no hearing back from recruiter for a long time for the interview process.
Round 2 ( Technical Interview -1 ) : 45 minutes
Started with short introduction and asked some OOPS based general questions about polymorphism, inheritance, encapsulation , abstraction.
Then asked 2 technical questions and asked for the production ready code :
Longest substring without repeated characters
Explained him the sliding window approach using hashing and coded the same , then discussion over time and space complexity with corner cases.
https://leetcode.com/problems/capacity-to-ship-packages-within-d-days/description/
Question was exactly similar to this concept with language change. Explained him the brute force approach with linear search, he agrees but asked me to optimize it further on time complexity. Took bit of time and he provided one hint and I was able to solve this with binary search. Wrote the production ready code.
Some questions based on Leadership principles.
Round 3 ( Technical Interview -2 ) : 45 minutes
This round was taken by 2 persons ( concept of shadow interview in amazon).
After a short introduction of all of us , she quickly moved to the questions :
Check whether tree is perfect binary tree with all leaves at same level
I told her the approach with DFS and BFS , she asked me the better one of the two and code the same. Wrote production ready code along with comments. We both discussed for time and space complexity and why I choose one over other.
Discussed some instances where I applied Leadership principles in my current organizations. Explained her multiple instances.
Find the pivot point where array left sum equal to array right sum
Told her the approach with extra space and she asked to optimize it on space complexity. Told her the optimized one but time left was very little so could not write clean code with comments. Seems might be some edge test cases might have missed.
Round 4 ( Hiring Manager ) : 45 minutes
Detailed discussion on projects , current role and lot of behavioral questions based on Amazon Leadership principles.
Only one technical question was asked :
Check whether a given expression is valid, a little modified with characters/operands, operators, brackets and special characters.
Bit tricky after modification. Do not exactly rememeber this question as he continuously modified the question.
Told him the approach and coded the same and discussed upon time and space complexities.
Round 5 ( Bar Raiser Round ) : 45 minutes
Again detailed discussion on role and innovation done at current role. Challenges faced during the same.
Used STAR technique for answering such questions and included amazon LP as well.
Then he came to the question part and surprisingly asked design question :
Design a locker system such that for every packet you can get the best fit locker available. Lockers and packets are three dimensional.
Result : Rejected with waiver of cooling period to 3 months
Feedback - Test-case coverage was weak in BR round.