Educational Background – B.Tech from a Tier-1 NIT, 2024 Batch
Professional Experience – 6-month internship + 9 months full-time to present.
I received an email for an Amazon loop interview on 12th March. However, I haven’t received any calls from the recruiter regarding this. The interview was scheduled for 14th March.
Round 1: (14th March)
The interview started with a brief introduction from both sides. There were two panelists, but one remained silent throughout the interview.
It began with scenario-based questions:
How important do you think communication is within a team?
Describe a situation where you had to do something out of your comfort zone.
How has your experience with corporate life been so far, and what have you learned?
I provided brief answers using the STAR method, and the interviewer seemed impressed with my responses.
One DSA Question:
Amazon reviews are given by customers, and there are certain good review words like “Excellent,” “Good,” etc. The task was to count the number of good review words in a review and sort the reviews based on that count.
Follow-ups:
If weights are assigned to reviews, how would you handle that?
Explain the internal working of a HashSet and HashMap and the reasons for using them.
Why use a priority queue? Explain its internal implementation.
What are the time and space complexities of your solution?
The interviewer was impressed with my solution, confirmed that it was correct, and gave positive feedback.
P.S. – It has been almost 8-9 days since Round 1, and I haven't received any positive or negative feedback from Amazon. I will update this thread if I receive any updates.
Edit 1 -
Received an email from Amazon on 31st March stating that I had qualified the first round and that the second round was scheduled for the next day, 1st April.
Round 2: (1st April)
The interviewers were likely from the Japan office, which I had anticipated since the interview was scheduled for 9 in the morning, and the India office usually doesn’t conduct interviews that early.
The interviewer clearly explained the format at the beginning:
2 behavioral questions
Followed by a technical question
Behavioral Questions:
Tell me about a time when you had to take up responsibility outside of your own work.
Was there a time when you had to show bias for action?
These, along with the introductions from both sides, took up nearly 25 minutes of the interview.
Technical Question:
We then moved on to the technical part with around 30 minutes remaining (the last 5 minutes were reserved for me to ask questions).
The interviewer pasted the question, and to my surprise, it was a LLD problem — to design a music system, with some additional requirements. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting an LLD question for an SDE-1 interview at Amazon, since they typically stick to DSA for that level.
Fortunately, I had experience with LLD problems, so I:
Gathered all the requirements first.
Coded the base classes like Song, Artist, Album, etc.
Implemented the music system with all the basic requirements
The interviewer also asked a few follow-up questions related to my design, such as:
Can we not use an iterative loop here?
How would you calculate the average rating of a song, considering each song is unique in your in-memory DB?
I managed to code the entire basic design solution. The interviewer mentioned that this was what she was expecting as a solution. Although we didn’t get to the additional requirements, I communicated that to her, and she said she was satisfied with the solution.
Final 5 Minutes:
The interviewer opened the floor for questions, and I asked mine.
P.S. – To be honest, I wasn’t expecting an LLD problem for an SDE-1 Amazon interview. It was quite different from what I had heard. It’s been 5 days since the interview, and I haven’t received any update from Amazon yet. I’ll update this thread once I get a response.