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/