Amazon || SDE 1 || March 2022 || Off-campus

How I applied to Amazon?
I was applying to Amazon for more than two years on their career site initially in the hope of getting a summer internship and then for getting a full-time offer but never received a test link. In January 2022 I got a mail regarding hiring for Software Development Engineer-1 role, I applied for the same. 10 days after the test, I received a mail “Congratulations on clearing the Online Assessment round. We will be scheduling your Interview rounds in the upcoming weeks.!”

Timeline
The complete process took around 1.5 months.

Online Assessment
Platform: HackerRank

Sections:

Coding (70 minutes): It consisted of 2 DSA questions.
Work Style Assessment (20 minutes): It was based on Amazon’s Leadership Principle.
On February 2nd, 2022 I got a mail informing that I have cleared the online assessment and my interviews will be scheduled shortly.

Interview Round 1 (40 minutes)
One of Amazon’s SDE-2 took this round. We started with a brief introduction. The interviewer introduced himself and then asked me to introduce myself with a brief introduction of the project I have worked on. He asked a few follow-up questions on projects. Then he jumped into DSA. He told to me that he will be asking 2 DSA questions and I have to code both of them. I can not disclose the exact questions as I have signed the Non-Disclosure agreement but I can give a brief idea of the topics on which questions were based.

1. The first one was a straightforward tree traversal problem similar to the lowest common ancestor problem. I started with brute force approach and then optimized it to lowest common ancestor approach. I missed a few corner cases while coding which he later pointed out and I corrected it.
2. Second one was a dynamic programming question similar to the stock sell problem. I explained to him different approaches along with their time and space complexities. He kept on insisting me to optimize and once he was satisfied with the approach he asked me to code.

In the end, he asked if I have any questions for him. I asked him about what he feels about the scale of impact he makes through his contribution at Amazon.

Interview Round 2 (60 minutes)
The interviewer introduced himself and asked me to introduce myself as well. He was SDM with 20 years of experience., he asked me to explain my project in detail. we had a brief discussion about one of my Web Development projects. He asked me to share my screen and walk through my complete project with an explanation of every part of the functionality and tools I have used to build it.

Then he moved to the DSA part.

The question was completely new to me and I had never seen any similar question before. It was related to Trie and even after the interview I tried to search it on the web but didn’t find the question anywhere.
I took a lot of time on the question in this round. The code was very lengthy and there were a lot of edge cases. I was able to build up the logic but couldn’t code the complete solution within the stipulated time.

In the end, he asked if I have any questions for him. I asked him about being such a big organization how does Amazon ensures that it keeps track of the contribution of every employee and rewards them suitably.

Interview Round 3: Bar Raiser (60 minutes)
This was the last interview round. The interviewer introduced himself and asked me to introduce myself as well. He was also SDM with 15 years of experience.

He then asked me to share my screen and explain one of my projects. Then he asked me 2 coding questions.

1. It was similar to reversing a Linked List in a group of K-nodes.
2. From my approach of reversing the Linked List he dig into it and asked me to reverse a stack without using any extra space. It took me a while to figure out the approach but in the end, I was able to explain to him and code my approach without any error and he was impressed.

After coding the second question, I dry-run it for the input he gave. Then he gave a bigger Test Case and said that the code will fail for this. I just gave a look at the test case and said that “Sir, It will work.”. This was the “Do or Die” moment, but I was sure about my code. And I dry run the bigger test case and it worked.

After this, the interviewer asked me some behavioral questions like

Tell me about a time, when you were in a team project and what was your contribution to it. And what will you do if one of your team members is on leave due to some reason and you have to finish the project on a deadline?
How did you handle it? How do you approach any new feature, etc?
After this, he asked if I had any questions for him. I asked him about his experience and the new products amazon working on.

Result — Got the offer! 🎉

TIPS

1. Never fake anything on your resume
2. Listen to questions carefully and ask any clarifying questions
3. Don’t just think and code, Talk and Code
4. Test for edge cases and always sample dry run
5. Good code quality
6. Amazon focuses a lot on its Leadership principles, so prepare them well beforehand
7. Always ask questions at the end of the interview, it shows that you are interested in interviewing at the company
8. Have faith in the almighty that you will get what’s destined for you.

Never give up. Never get disappointed with your rejections. Or the lack of opportunities you have. It only takes one fine day of the performance to completely transform your life but the preparation behind it takes years. Finally, keep faith in yourself. All the very best ❤️

Hope you liked this post. Please feel free to drop in your comments, and ask any queries I would be happy to help with everything I can.