Amazon : SWE New Grad 2026 USA: Interview Experience
Summary
I attended four interview rounds at Amazon Seattle for an SDE1 role; despite multiple problem‑solving attempts, I was rejected.
Full Experience
Role: SDE1, S3 Glacier (AWS) Location: Onsite, Seattle HQ Date: August 2026 Outcome: Rejected
Four rounds, each an hour, each split the same way: behavioural first, then technical.
Round 1 (Bar Raiser). Leadership Principles the whole hour. No code.
Round 2. 15 min on my GenAI experience and how I use AI tools day to day. Then 45 min on a sliding-window substring problem. I gave brute force, then a better approach, then the optimal one.
Round 3. 15 min LP on ownership. Then 45 min on parenthesis matching with a stack. Same path: brute, better, optimal.
This round is the one that went wrong, and not because of the problem. The interviewer was unresponsive to the point where I could not tell whether anything I said had landed. I explained the approach three ways and got almost nothing back. You cannot course‑correct against silence.
Round 4. 15 min LP on ownership. Then 45 min on low‑level design: design a rate limiter. I did the OOP design in C++.
Happy to answer questions about the loop or the prep.
Full write‑up : https://jenishkothari.pages.dev/four-rounds-at-amazon-seattle-hq/
Interview Questions (2)
Parenthesis Matching with a Stack
Given a string containing only '(' and ')', determine whether the parentheses are balanced. Use a stack to push opening brackets and pop when a closing bracket is encountered, ensuring the stack is empty at the end.
Design a Rate Limiter
Design a low‑level rate limiter that restricts the number of requests allowed per a given time window. The design should be object‑oriented, suitable for implementation in C++, and handle concurrency considerations if needed.