SDE 1 (US) interview experience - Amazon
Summary
I interviewed for an SDE 1 role at Amazon and despite feeling confident about my performance in the three rounds covering coding, system design, and behavioral questions, I ultimately received a rejection.
Full Experience
I gave an SDE1 interview for a Fungible role in the US on September 8th, with my Online Assessment completed sometime in June.
Round 1: This round began with two Amazon Leadership Principles (LPs) questions, followed by a coding question on LRU Cache implementation. I felt this round went excellently as I was able to answer everything thoroughly.
Round 2: I was asked two coding questions. The first involved a tweak on the BFS Shortest Path algorithm, very similar to the LeetCode problem 'Number of Connected Components in an Undirected Graph'. The second was a variation of the 'Random Pick with Weight' problem. I successfully solved the first problem but could only provide pseudocode for the second due to time constraints.
Round 3: This round primarily focused on behavioral questions, where I was asked four more Leadership Principles questions. I believe I answered all of them well.
Verdict: Unfortunately, I was rejected. It's tough, but it seems Amazon has significantly raised the bar given the current backlog of candidates.
Interview Questions (4)
I was asked to implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache. This typically involves designing a cache that evicts the least recently used items when it reaches its capacity.
The first coding question in Round 2 involved a tweak on the BFS Shortest Path algorithm. It was mentioned to be very similar to the LeetCode problem 'Number of Connected Components in an Undirected Graph'. This implies navigating a graph to find shortest paths or properties within connected components, possibly with some modified conditions.
The second coding question was a variation of the LeetCode problem 'Random Pick with Weight'. This problem typically asks to implement a function that picks an index randomly, according to the weights assigned to each index. The tweak might involve additional constraints or modifications to the standard problem.
Throughout the interview process, across multiple rounds, I was asked various behavioral questions centered around Amazon's Leadership Principles. These questions required me to share past experiences that demonstrated specific principles such as customer obsession, ownership, invent and simplify, etc.