Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Leadership Principles and a Timestamp-Based LRU-Style Object

A female PM and an SDE interviewed me.

They began with Leadership Principles questions:

• Tell me about a time when you needed to take responsibility or ownership.
• Tell me about a time when you faced a challenge.

These were standard Leadership Principles questions. The follow-ups were about AI and impact: how many people used what I built, what my manager's reaction was, and related points.

Then I had to code an object similar to an LRU cache. The set operation received a timestamp, key, and value from outside the object. For get(key), I needed to return the value associated with the maximum timestamp.

I really did not understand the question and wasted a lot of time. I could not finish the implementation, and I was rejected. This was my first phone screen of the year; I was also too nervous and did not perform well.