Amazon SDE 1 NewGrad SDE Interview Experience USA
Summary
I completed four interview rounds for an SDE 1 position at Amazon in Seattle, solving coding, system design, and behavioral questions and received an offer.
Full Experience
Hello everyone, I have completed my Amazon SDE 1 loop and received an offer!
Format: 4 rounds — 3 in-person rounds and 1 BR round (virtual) at Seattle for AWS.
Round 1 - Coding + Behavioral Started with an LP question:
“Tell me about a time when you had a blocker in your work and how did you resolve that blocker? What would you have done differently?”
For coding, I was asked Path Sum II. I clarified the problem, explained my approach, and coded it in around 30 minutes.
With around 15 minutes left, the interviewer gave me a follow-up, which was a hard variation of the previous problem. I needed some hints, picked them up, explained my approach, and the interviewer seemed happy.
Round 2 - LLD Started with an LP question:
“Tell me about a time where you took work outside of your responsibility.”
Technical: Design a billing service for AWS for a single user where the usage and rate of all the services used are given.
This was the best round of the entire loop. I explained each of my design choices, and the interviewer came up with follow-ups which I was able to answer. Overall, it was a very good discussion.
Round 3 - Coding + Behavioral (HM Round) The first 30 minutes were entirely related to Gen AI discussion.
Then came the technical part. First question was First Non-Repeating Character, solved that in around 10 minutes.
The next question was a slight modification of Merge Intervals, which I solved as well.
Round 4 - Bar Raiser This one was entirely behavioral. There were a lot of follow-ups for every story you speak about - “Why this?”, “Why that?”, etc.
You really need to know your stories well for this round.
Timeline Feb 10: Applied with a referral
July 10: Received OA
July 11: Completed OA
July 15: Original Job ID moved to “No longer under consideration” and a new Job ID was opened
July 20: Received email that I passed OA
July 28: Recruiter reached out asking for my availability between Aug 17–21
Aug 14: Received tentative schedule and Save the Date email
Aug 18: Received confirmation with interviewer details
Aug 20 & Aug 24: Interviews
Aug 27: Result — Offer
Interview Questions (3)
Path Sum II
Given a binary tree and a target sum, return all root‑to‑leaf paths where the sum of the node values equals the target sum.
First Non-Repeating Character
Given a string, find the first character that does not repeat and return its index. If every character repeats, return -1.
Billing Service Design
Design a billing service for a cloud platform for a single user. The service receives the usage of various services and their respective rates, and must compute the total bill. Consider scalability, data storage, rate updates, and API design.