Passed Amazon SDE New Grad

Got the L4 New Grad SDE Offer at Amazon – Here's How I Prepared

I recently got an offer for a new grad SDE (L4) position at Amazon, and I wanted to share my journey — from knowing nothing about DSA to cracking the interviews. Hopefully, this helps someone who's starting from scratch too.

Phase 3: Online Assessment + Work Simulation (Mid-May)

• Got an email saying I had 5 days to complete the OA.
• Problem 1: Count the number of palindromes in a string (or something similar). My solution didn’t pass all test cases — not because it was wrong, but because it was too slow.
• Problem 2: Required a greedy + heap approach. I passed all the test cases.

Work Simulation:

• Was supposed to be open for 5 days. After one day, I got another email saying the next day was the last.
• Since it was Saturday and support wasn’t available, I completed it immediately.

Phase 4: First Technical Interview (30 Minutes)

Questions:

1. Anagram Checker
   • Determine if two strings are anagrams.
   • The interviewer asked me not to use Python’s built-in functions.
   • Still a fairly easy problem.
2. Stream of Words
   • For each incoming word, return the last seen anagram (if any), or the word itself.
   • I used the same logic from the previous problem and a hash map with sorted keys.

I passed and was invited to the final round: three back-to-back 1-hour interviews.

Phase 5: Final Interviews (3 x 1hr on the Same Day)

Behavioral Preparation (Leadership Principles)

• Wrote five STAR-format stories that covered most of Amazon’s Leadership Principles.
• Practiced behavioral answers using questions generated by ChatGPT.
• Rehearsed with my girlfriend.

Technical Interviews

Interview 1:

• Deepest Level in a Tree
  • Given a tree (not necessarily binary), return its maximum depth.
  • I used a BFS approach.
• Lowest Common Ancestor
  • Find the LCA of two nodes in a tree where each node has a pointer to its parent.
  • I solved this by recursively propagating upward.

Interview 2:

• This round was system design/database oriented, which caught me off guard.

Question:

• Design a system to track how many people are in the office at any given time.

Follow-ups:

• Design queries to return the number of people at a specific timestamp.
• Find the maximum number of people during a time interval.

I didn’t perform well here due to no experience in OOD or DB design. The interviewer wasn’t very kind and laughed a bit when I got stuck. I stayed focused and moved on.

Interview 3:

• Validate Alexa commands based on rules such as:
  • The first word must be “Alexa”
  • No repeated words back-to-back
  • Other constraints

Initial Approach:

• Hardcoded all checks using logical conditions.

Refactored Approach:

• Created an abstract Rule class
• Defined each rule as a subclass
• Stored rules in a set and validated them using a loop (more scalable and cleaner)

Final Thoughts

• You don’t need to solve all 150 NeetCode problems. Understanding patterns and building intuition is far more important.
• Use AI to learn, not to cheat. Your understanding matters more than the number of problems you “complete.”
• Some interviewers emphasize how your algorithm works, not just correctness. For example, in the BFS problem, I was asked:
  • Why BFS uses a queue
  • The advantages and disadvantages of BFS and DFS
  • When I would use each approach