Amazon Graduate | 2025 Software Development Engineer, EC2 Live Migration ID: 3022579 Interview

I recently had an interview opportunity at amazon for the Graduate | 2025 Software Development Engineer, EC2 Live Migration role in their Germany office. It was a bit surprising as I hadn't even applied for this specific position through their portal, but a recruiter reached out to schedule it.

First Round

My first round was a technical interview with the Engineering Manager for the team. Despite being labeled 'technical,' the initial 30 minutes were dedicated to Amazon's Leadership Principles (LPs). I hadn't specifically prepared for LP questions in this round, but I managed to answer them to some extent. The subsequent 30 minutes delved into technical topics like virtual memory, OS concepts, and memory swapping. Following this, I was presented with a LeetCode-style parsing question. I successfully passed this round.

Amazon Interview Loop

The main interview loop consisted of three rounds.

a. First Loop Round (Technical)

This round focused on two LeetCode questions. First, I solved a Binary Search on Matrix problem in about 5 minutes, which pleased the interviewer. The second question was Reorganize String. I explained my intuition and proposed a solution using a max heap. However, the interviewer insisted that removing a node from a heap would break its balance and result in an O(N) operation. I tried to clarify how heaps work, including node removal and heapify operations, but he remained unconvinced. During the complexity analysis, I mentioned certain parts were O(1) due to the input string only containing lowercase ASCII letters. He then questioned why I hadn't considered using another data structure given only 26 possible characters. I explained that a fixed-length array could be used, but a heap would be superior for UTF-8 inputs, and I also elaborated on the complexity of scanning for the character with the maximum count.

b. Second Loop Round (LP)

This round was entirely dedicated to Amazon's Leadership Principles. I believe this interviewer was the bar raiser. I had prepared well by crafting stories for the LPs and was able to answer all questions effectively.

c. Third Loop Round (LP + Small Coding Task)

The final round began with approximately 40 minutes of discussion about the team and more LP questions. Afterward, I was given a LeetCode-style coding task: Given a CSV file, display it in a user-friendly way. I explained my approach and implemented the solution. The interviewer then asked how to modify the code to support HTML rendering, which I also explained, and he seemed satisfied with my response.

Final Result

Five days later, I received the final decision: I was rejected.