Amazon | SDE 1 | Bangalore | June 2022[Offer]
Summary
I successfully navigated a rigorous four-round interview process for an SDE 1 position at Amazon in Bangalore, ultimately securing an offer. The process involved a mix of coding, system design, and Amazon's core leadership principles.
Full Experience
My Amazon SDE 1 Interview Experience
I am an employee at a service-based company with a B.Tech in CSE from a Tier-3 college. I received an offer for the SDE 1 position at Amazon in Bangalore in June 2022. The entire process took about two months and consisted of four elimination rounds: an Online Assessment followed by three technical interviews.
1. Online Assessment (March 22, 2022) [2 hours]
This round had two coding questions to be solved within 105 minutes. I also had to elaborate on my coding approach. Both questions were at an easy-medium LeetCode level, and I managed to complete both. The remaining 15 minutes were dedicated to work style and preference questions.
2. Technical Round 1 (1st week of May 2022) [1 hour]
There were three people on the interview panel: a recruiter and two SDE-2s, though the recruiter and one SDE-2 remained on mute. The interviewer introduced himself and we discussed my recent project. He then moved on to coding questions.
- Question 1: "min time burn a tree from a specific node"
- Question 2: Similar to Decode Ways II.
I successfully solved both problems within the hour. The interviewer did not ask any Leadership Principle (LP) questions in this round.
3. Technical Round 2 (3rd week of May 2022) [1 hour]
Only one SDE-1 took this round, which included both coding and LP questions.
- Question 1: A problem based on a binary search approach.
- Question 2: "min platform for train"
I initially struggled with the first problem because the problem statement was incomplete and sample test cases were not explained. However, after I asked all my doubts, he clarified it. I then solved both problems optimally, and the interviewer seemed satisfied with my approach. In the last 10 minutes, I was asked a few LP questions and then invited to ask questions myself.
4. Bar Raiser Round (2nd week of June 2022) [1 hour]
This round focused on coding, Low-Level Design (LLD), and Leadership Principles. The first 30 minutes were entirely LP-based, with the interviewer asking multiple follow-up questions for each LP question.
- Question 1: A problem based on a Binary Tree.
- Question 2: I was asked to implement a generic file system where I could find a file by size (equal, min, max) and file type (.pdf, .xml, etc.). I implemented the necessary classes and explained my approach.
Five days after this round, the recruiter called me to inform me of my selection. I also shared my compensation details on LeetCode's discuss forum.
Thanks for reading, and best of luck for your future!
Interview Questions (4)
Given a binary tree and a specific starting node, find the minimum time required to burn the entire tree. The fire spreads from the given node to its adjacent nodes (parent, left child, right child) in one unit of time.
A message containing letters from A-Z is being encoded to numbers using the following mapping: 'A' -> 1, 'B' -> 2, ..., 'Z' -> 26. To the encoding rules, a '' character is added which can represent any digit from '1' to '9'. Given an encoded message containing digits and the '' character, return the number of ways to decode it.
Given the arrival and departure times of all trains that arrive at a railway station, find the minimum number of platforms required for the station so that no train has to wait.
Design a generic file system that allows searching for files based on their size (equal, minimum, maximum) and file type (e.g., .pdf, .xml). I was asked to implement the classes and explain my approach.