Amazon | New Grad | March 2020
Summary
I interviewed for a New Grad position at Amazon in March 2020, undergoing four rounds of interviews that covered coding, system design, and behavioral questions.
Full Experience
I recently interviewed for a New Grad position at Amazon in March 2020. The interview process consisted of four distinct rounds, each designed to assess different skill sets.
My first round involved a practical coding challenge: I was asked to implement the classic game of Tic-Tac-Toe. This round likely focused on my ability to design object-oriented solutions and handle game state logic effectively.
The second round presented a graph-related problem. I was given a list of URLs along with the links emanating from each, and the task was to determine if a connection or path existed between any two specified URLs. This primarily tested my understanding and application of graph traversal algorithms like Breadth-First Search (BFS) or Depth-First Search (DFS).
The third round was a comprehensive system design challenge, where I was tasked with designing the Amazon checkout system. This required me to consider various aspects of a large-scale e-commerce system, including user experience, database architecture, payment integration, and scalability.
Finally, the fourth round delved back into data structures and algorithms, with a problem focused on binary trees. I needed to find the maximum width level of a binary tree, a common problem that often leverages level-order traversal techniques.
In addition to these technical and system design problems, each round also included a segment dedicated to behavioral questions, typically lasting 10-15 minutes. These questions aimed to understand my past experiences and how they align with Amazon's core principles.
Interview Questions (4)
Implement the classic game of Tic-Tac-Toe. This involves designing the game board, handling player moves, checking for win conditions (rows, columns, diagonals), and managing the overall game state. Object-oriented design principles are often crucial for a clean solution.
Given a list of URLs and a mapping of outgoing links from each URL, determine if a direct or indirect link path exists between any two specified URLs. This problem can be modeled as a graph where URLs are nodes and links are directed edges, requiring graph traversal algorithms like BFS or DFS.
Design the Amazon checkout system. Considerations should include user authentication, shopping cart management, payment processing, order fulfillment, inventory updates, concurrency handling, and ensuring high availability and scalability for a global user base.
Find the maximum width of a binary tree. The width of a level is defined as the length of the longest line segment between the leftmost and rightmost non-null nodes at that level, where nulls between the leftmost and rightmost nodes are also counted. This problem typically requires a level-order traversal approach.