Amazon | SDE1 | On site | Interview Experience
Hello Guys,
I wanted to make this post to help some fellow leetcoders as they have helped me. I have recently (1 week ago) completed a virtual onsite interview for Amazon. I can't dive in too deep on the exact questions due to the NDA but this was my experience. The interview was for SDE1 - India.
Round 1
- This was I think was by far the easiest one, I was given a coding question (not on leetcode) about Amazon deliveries and I was required to find some sort of maximum value (don't want to go too deep), the implementation I believe was pretty simple.
- The interviewers kept asking follow up questions to see how it can be changed based on certain factors
- The LP questions were also really good (I highly recommend that you prepare a lot of stories that have depth because for every LP question I had, they asked like 3 follow ups)
- Overall this round was pretty good, could've been better but I felt that the interviewers are pretty junior and shouldn't have really interviewed me.
Round 2
- The second round was actually really intense but the interviewer was heaven sent, it really felt like they supported me finding out the solution. It was an ODD question, concerning graphs, dictionaries and DFS traversals. The problem was pretty straightforward but the implementation was far from it.
- I like that not a lot of time was spent on LP questions to give me adequate time to implement the solution
- I was able to come up with the intended solution and got all of the follow ups within the time allocated.
- The LP questions were very similar to round one (please please please prepare LP stories)
Round 3
- Now this was the hardest round for sure. To be honest I don't know if I gave the right answer, I recalled some leetcode questions that had a similar pattern to this and kind of went with it, the questions on Leetcode are mid to hard DP questions. I think I could've solved it better using a different way but when you have 30 minutes, you have to commit
- I went through my solution a couple of times with the interviewer with sample inputs until I explained what every line did and I think he was convinced.
Overall my experience was A LOT better than expected. I really enjoyed these interviews and the people that interviewed me and I would honestly love to work with them. They all assured me that they haven't seen anyone get PIPed in a long time and that the WLB is really nice. Again, because of the NDA I can't disclose anything specific but I really want you guys to keep grinding and keep pursuing, I will keep you guys updated if I get in or not.
For those interested this was how I prepped for this interview. I knew that I would be interviewing a month in advance (I love my recruiter for giving me so much time). I created so many templates of common patterns and wrote notes on how I implemented a lot of common solutions. I solved just under 200 questions in the last 2 months or so. It was not easy but having made it this far, I really see how it's been super effective in just my general CS knowledge. I really hope I make it, it will change my life for sure. If you have any questions please ask them below.