Amazon 2m SDE intern Interview Experience
Summary
I successfully interviewed for an SDE intern position at Amazon, navigating through an online assessment and a technical round that included challenging coding problems, ultimately receiving an offer.
Full Experience
My journey to an SDE intern role at Amazon began with an Online Assessment (OA). It comprised two coding questions, both of medium difficulty, which I completed comfortably within 45 minutes. After a 15-minute personality survey, I faced a two-month silence, leading me to believe I hadn't made it. However, I received an interview schedule mid-November, giving me 10 days to prepare for two coding questions.
The technical interview kicked off with an introduction, followed by a discussion on the difficulties I faced during my MERN-stack project. The interviewer then quickly moved to the coding challenges, providing an online IDE for coding and dry-running my solutions.
I found the overall experience positive; the interviewer was very friendly and offered hints when I got stuck. I also used the opportunity to ask about intern projects and their own experience at Amazon. Ultimately, I was selected, which was incredibly rewarding after facing previous rejections.
Interview Questions (3)
You are given a 0-indexed integer array nums and a positive integer k. We call an index i k-big if the following conditions are satisfied:
- There exist at least
kdifferent indicesidx1such thatidx1 < iandnums[idx1] < nums[i]. - There exist at least
kdifferent indicesidx2such thatidx2 > iandnums[idx2] < nums[i].
Return the number of k-big indices.
Example:
Input: nums = [2,3,6,5,2,3], k = 2
Output: 2
I was asked a variation of the classic House Robber problem. The interviewer specifically inquired about solving it using both memoization and tabulation approaches of dynamic programming, and to discuss the storage of values in the DP vector.
We are given an array asteroid of integers representing asteroids in a row. For each asteroid, the absolute value represents its size, and the sign represents its direction (positive meaning right, negative meaning left). Each asteroid moves at the same speed. Find out the state of the asteroids after all collisions. If two asteroids meet, the smaller one will explode. If both are the same size, both will explode. Two asteroids moving in the same direction will never meet.
Example:
Input: asteroids = [5,10, -5]
Output: [5,10]
Explanation: The 10 and -5 collide resulting in 10. The 5 and 10 never collide.
Preparation Tips
With only 10 days between receiving the interview schedule and the interview itself, my preparation focused on rigorous practice of Data Structures and Algorithms questions. I believe consistency in practicing DSA problems is key to success.