Hey guys,

First things first, thanks a lot for your help and support throughout my preparation journey.
I would like to share my interview experience to give back to the community.

Now I know many posts are there regarding Amazon SDE1 but one of my rounds was a bit strange. So here is it, let me know if you guys have any question.

I have applied to over 25 roles at the amazon careers page - all rejected. One fine day a recruiter contacted me and gave me an OA link. Not sure what happened but it's for the good!

Online Round(2 hrs):

1. I don't remember the exact question but it was related to arrays (LC - easy to med)
2. Given a 2D matrix with each cell representing the direction one can move find the shortest path to the final cell. Solved using dijkstra's algo

Got result in 1 day regarding interview scheduling

Round 1 (1 hr):
Interviewer was an SDE -2 and he was very friendly.
We exchanged introductions and then went straight to the dsa round.

1. Minimum number of squares whose sum equals to given number n

• First gave top down DFS solution and then memoized it
• Then he asked for more optimized so i gave him bottom up
• He was satisfied but he expected to tell BFS (same complexity)
• Took about 20 mins

2. https://leetcode.com/problems/word-ladder/

• Had no idea what this question was but was somehow able to model it as graph
• Asked him what could the input size be (if you are stuck try asking this so you can deduce what algo could be applied)
• He was satisfied after telling him complexity
• Asked me what the complexity would be if all possible words(doesn't have to make sense) is present, we had a discussion for a while

3. Last 10 mins He asked me some questions about virtual functions in C++(since that was my preferred lang) and told about his team.

Round 2(1hr):
Interviewed by SDE II and again super friendly.
Exchanged intro's and straight to coding questions.

1. Find the equilibrium point of array - find the smallest index where sum of left part = sum of right part.

• Gave the solution and he gave some egs to dry run did that as well.
• Interviewer was satisfied with my solution and asked me to code.

2. Maximum number of platforms for a train schedule - given a train schedule (arrival and departure) find min platforms needed to make this schedule work.

• I gave him difference array technique and explain him how it works
• He gave lots of eg to check if it will work and we dry ran on the test cases.
• Finally he asked me to optimize the space (I couldn't do it) sorting and two pointers apparently - but he gave some hints I just couldn't pick it up.
• Anyways the interviewer was satisfied (took about 55 mins on the whole)

3. He talked about his team and I asked him about the culture, he addressed how rumours floating around about toxic amazon culture is not very true. We do have to work hard but its not toxic at all ,one of the perks of owning the entire product.

Result came in 2 days to schedule next two rounds of interview

Round 3(1hr)
Interviewer was a Senior Development Manager, super friendly.

1. He gave his intro
2. I gave my intro and he asked various questions like which project are you proud of(I showed him a live demo), What technical difficulties you faced on a project, Internship questions etc..... Went on for about 20 mins
3. He asked me to design a file sharing service when the system can hold size of particular bytes - I was a bit shocked to hear about this, But he wanted the basic functionality to work. Was asked to code only specific modules like chunk aggregation and block splitting, locks used imaginary functions(stated the assumption to interviewer). Spoke about ORM's, how sql handles data, multi threading, how to handle errors in this etc..
4. He said he was impressed by my projects and went on to talk about how his team handles a million transactions per second which is growing higher and higher as day progresses. I was mesmerized, the meeting came to an end.

Round 4(1hr) [Probably bar raiser]
Interviewer was a SDE 2 and again super friendly, But I panicked a lot because of last round and pressure what not.

1. He gave his intro
2. 30 mins grilled about my intro and internship. Guess I didnt explain everything properly so he asked many questions until he understood what my exact goal in internship was. Then he asked about any projects I did - I had to explain the architecture of the project (it was done a long time so I couldn't answer more to his queires which I let him know ) he again asked any other project- spoke about other project I did with microservices. He asked how is this beneficial to anyone - answered with a use case.
3. Coding question - gave some api's with which we have to construct a weighted graph ( don't remember the details - but was a medium question) then apply BFS to find some probabilities. We talked about logic and he asked me to code a "production grade" code. I was stcuk and then he asked me you don't know what it is? Then I recalled it should be clean, meaningful(variable names, spacing, column breakages) then I added couple of testcases separately in a test file to which he appreciated me that it was so thoughtful.
4. At the end we had 10 mins - spoke about customer obsession at Amazon, love for marvel movies( he asked me whether I watch those) and bid adieu

Result came in a day, recruiter called me and I shouted in excitement. Verdict: Accepted

I had these questions when people post anonymously so I would answer them myself:

• Are you a competitive programmer
  I would say no - but did some codeforces in my first years then dropped it(graph fluctuated peak was high specialist)

• What is my leetcode rating
  About 1700 (attended 1 contest only)

• How many problems have I solved
  Easy - 200, Med - 350, Hard - 55

• Compensation
  Soon

On a final note: I'm not very smart kid, but really hard working one. So for all my friends out there, don't worry about failures just keep grinding it eventually works out for you all.

Thank you for reading, Have a good day!