Amazon SDE-I Interview Experience (Bangalore)

I recently went through the Amazon University Hiring process for the Software Development Engineer I role (Bengaluru location). I applied without any referral and thought I’d share my experience.

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🗓 Timeline:

• Applied: 13 May

• Online Assessment Received: 14 May

• Assessment Submitted: 17 May

  • 2 DSA problems (Easy–Medium)

  Completed both in around 15 minutes.

  • Work Simulation
  • Work Style Assessment

• Interview Invite: 3 June

• Round 1 Interview: 6 June (1 hr)

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🔍 Interview Breakdown:

The interview began with a brief introduction and a short discussion on my resume and projects (~10 min), followed by two DSA questions.

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🧩 Problem 1: Optimal Network Construction

Input:

• m cities (0 to m-1)
• n roads represented as [u, v, toll_tax]

Output:

• A boolean array of size n where true at index i means the i-th road can be part of any optimal route

Definition of Optimal Route:

• Connects all cities
• Uses the minimum number of roads
• Among those, has the minimum total toll tax

Despite being prepared, this one completely threw me off. I couldn’t come up with the optimal approach during the interview. The twist was that it wasn't just about building one MST — it was about finding all possible MST edges, which made it much more challenging. There was also a slight mistake in the example provided by the interviewer, but we clarified and fixed it during the discussion. We discussed three different approaches, but unfortunately, they were either incorrect or not optimized. The problem ended up taking around 40 minutes of discussion, which left limited time for the second question.

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🧠 Problem 2: Bitwise OR Excluding Subtree

Input:

• A rooted tree with N nodes (root = 0)
• N - 1 edges as [parent, child]
• A list of values for each node
• Q queries, each with a node u

Output:

• For each query, return the bitwise OR of values of all nodes excluding the subtree rooted at node u

This one felt more approachable. But by the time we started, there were only ~10 minutes left. The interviewer mentioned there wasn’t enough time left — so I could either write a brute-force solution or try to come up with an optimal approach if I could. I couldn't think of the optimal solution in time, so I went with a brute-force DFS and explained my thought process.

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🎯 Takeaways:

• Even with solid prep, you can still get caught off guard — and that’s part of the journey.
• Time management is critical in interviews.
• Post-interview reflection is where a lot of the real learning happens.
• I consider myself quite decent at DSA (currently a Guardian on LeetCode), but this interview reminded me that there’s always room to grow.

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📭 Outcome: Unfortunately, I didn’t get a call back after this round. But I’m still grateful for the experience and the learnings I took away from it.

*Post written with the help of ChatGPT