Amazon SDE Intern Interview Experience | Onsite Delhi | 2026 | Round 1 | DSA + Leadership Principles

Amazon SDE Intern Interview Experience (Onsite – Round 1)

Interview Type: In-person
Role: 6-Month SDE Internship
Rounds covered: Round 1

1. Resume and Leadership Principles

The interviewer started by reviewing my resume and asked:

Q. Tell me about a time when you took ownership.

I discussed my PlaceMate AI project, explaining why I built it, the problem it solves, and the ownership I took during its development.

Some follow‑up questions:

• How long did it take to build?
• What was the biggest technical challenge?
• How did you collect and organize the placement‑related data?

I explained that gathering and structuring information from WhatsApp conversations and other sources was one of the major challenges.

2. DSA Questions

Q1. Minimize the total weight after X operations

You are given an array where each element represents a weight. In one operation, you can choose any element and reduce its weight to half. You have to perform this operation X times and minimize the final sum of the array.

Example:
arr = [2, 5, 10, 23]

In one operation, you can choose 10 and reduce it to 5.

My approach:

• Initially considered sorting and repeatedly processing the largest element.
• After a hint from the interviewer, realized that the largest element may change after every operation.
• Used a Max Heap / Priority Queue instead.
• Insert all elements into the max heap.
• Repeat X times: extract the maximum, halve it, and insert the updated value back.
• Finally, calculate the sum of the remaining elements.

The interviewer agreed with the max heap approach.

Complexity discussion: The interviewer asked about the time complexities of heap operations and the overall solution. I got confused while explaining some of them.

Important operations to revise:

• top() – O(1)
• push() – O(log N)
• pop() – O(log N)
• Building a heap using repeated insertion – O(N log N)
• Summing all remaining elements – O(N)

Q2. Word Break / String Segmentation

Given an array of strings:

["catdog", "cat", "dog"]

Find strings that can be segmented into smaller strings that are also present in the array.

Example:

catdog = cat + dog

My approach:

• Recognized the problem as a variation of Word Break.
• Proposed storing the strings in an unordered_set for efficient lookup.
• Suggested using recursion to try different substrings and check whether they exist in the set.
• The interviewer asked me to rewrite my code on a fresh sheet. My implementation was not completely clean, particularly around substring boundaries and recursive choices.
• I also discussed the exponential nature of the naive recursive approach.

3. Questions for the Interviewer

At the end, I asked:

1. What are the expectations and goals for an intern during the six‑month internship?
2. With AI evolving so rapidly, how do you personally keep learning and upskilling?

Overall Experience

The interview focused on Leadership Principles, project discussion, and DSA.

The DSA questions required knowledge of:

• Greedy approach and Max Heap
• Priority Queue operations and time complexity
• Recursion and Word Break
• Hash Set and substring handling

The project discussion focused on ownership, motivation, development time, and technical challenges.

Preparation suggestions: Revise heap operations and their complexities thoroughly. Also practise recursion and Word Break with memoization, and make sure you can explain the time complexity of every operation in your solution.