My Amazon SDE-1 Interview Journey - Bangalore (Batch 2024)

I'm thrilled to share my interview experience at Amazon for the SDE-1 position in Bangalore, ultimately resulting in an offer! I hope this helps others in their preparation journey, just as the community helped me.

1. Online Assessment

This round took place sometime in March and lasted 2.5 hours. It included two Data Structures & Algorithms questions, Amazon's work simulator test, and a set of situational Multiple Choice Questions (MCSQs).

I received an email on April 16, 2025, confirming I cleared the OA and my interviews were scheduled for April 22 and 23.

2. Technical Round 1 - April 22, 2025 (1 hour)

This round started with a Leadership Principle question, followed by multiple follow-ups:

• Leadership Principle: Tell me about a time when you had to become a Subject Matter Expert to develop a feature you needed. Specify all tasks you did and the outcome.

After that, I was given one DSA (Coding) question. It was related to Priority Queues and also required an OOPS-based implementation. Due to an NDA, I cannot disclose the exact problem.

Within an hour, I received an email via Loop Scheduler for the second technical round.

3. Technical Round 2 - April 23, 2025 (1 hour)

Similar to the first technical round, this one also began with Leadership Principle questions:

• Leadership Principle: Tell me about a time where you could not deliver a product within the deadline and how did you convey this to stakeholders.
• Leadership Principle: Tell me about a time when you went out of your way and helped someone (your peer) at your work.
• Leadership Principle: Tell me about a time when you made some feature in a week or two, but then found out it was not what you wanted, and you needed to revamp it.

Next, I faced another DSA (Coding) question, again related to Priority Queues. This question was very vague, presented as just a single line statement. There were no test cases or examples provided, so I had to proactively ask for clarifications, think of all examples and edge cases on my own, and discuss them with the interviewer. It also required an OOPS-based implementation. Optimizations were asked as a follow-up, specifically related to deadlock handling and synchronization for parallel tasks.

Again, I received an email within an hour for Round 3 (Bar Raiser).

4. Bar Raiser Round 3 - April 28, 2025 (35 minutes)

This was an entirely Leadership Principle-focused round; no DSA or coding questions were asked. I was asked several behavioral questions:

• Leadership Principle: Tell me about a feature you developed end-to-end. What all options did you explore, and what choices did you make and why?
• Leadership Principle: Tell me about a time when you received critical feedback from your manager, and how did you take it?
• Leadership Principle: Tell me about a time when you had a different choice for something, but your colleague had a different opinion. How did you convince them to go with yours?
• Leadership Principle: Tell me about a time when you had to deliver a feature in a tighter deadline, and you did not get a chance to explore all options?
• Leadership Principle: Tell me about a time when you had to research a lot to reach your goal (related to 'Dive Deep' principle).

Follow-up questions were asked on every answer.

I received a call from the recruiter on May 8, 2025, confirming I cleared all rounds and they were extending an offer. The offer confirmation mail followed within three hours of the call.

The compensation is consistent with other SDE-1 offers that have been widely discussed.

My final advice: don't stop, keep giving your 100%, and believe in yourself. The rest will follow!