Amazon India SDE-1 Interview Experience

I'm excited to share my interview journey for an SDE-1 position at Amazon India. My timeline began with applying on June 30th, 2025, followed by an Online Assessment invitation on July 17th. I cleared the OA on July 21st, which involved solving two greedy problems on HackerRank within 70 minutes, alongside Work Simulation and Workstyle Simulation sections. I managed to complete the coding part in about 50 minutes.

Round 1

My first interview, on August 13th, was with an SDE who had approximately 7 years of experience. We started with brief introductions, then delved into two Amazon Leadership Principles. I was asked to describe a time I solved a problem I initially didn’t know how to approach, and another time I stepped out of my comfort zone. These discussions lasted about 15 minutes. For the coding segment, I faced two challenges: a variation of the Diameter of Binary Tree and a Matrix problem involving Heaps. I successfully solved both optimally. Although I initially misunderstood the first problem, I clarified it during a dry run and refined my approach. I made sure to clearly explain the time and space complexity for both solutions. The round concluded with me asking a few genuine questions about the team and Amazon’s culture.

Round 2

On August 28th, I had my second round with an SDE of about 3 years of experience. We began with introductions and discussed my past experiences. The coding problems for this round were Clone a Graph and Next Palindromic Number. For the graph problem, I was asked to dry run my idea first before writing any code, which I did, then implemented the optimal approach and explained its time and space complexity. For the palindromic number problem, I developed and clearly explained the logic, though we ran out of time to actually code it. We wrapped up with a short project discussion and my questions for him. This round actually extended by about 15 minutes because our conversation was quite engaging.

Round 3 (Bar Raiser)

My final round, the Bar Raiser, was originally scheduled for September 11th but was rescheduled to October 6th due to the interviewer's unavailability. This interviewer was an SDM with over 14 years of experience. This particular round was purely behavioral, with no coding involved. After quick introductions, we spent a significant 40 minutes discussing just two Leadership Principles, which involved many follow-up questions and "what-if" scenarios. The remaining 20 minutes were dedicated to discussing one of my projects and addressing my questions for him.

Ultimately, I received an offer call on October 7th, with the official offer letter following on October 8th. It was a comprehensive and rewarding experience!