Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — SDE II Phone Screen and a No-Backtrack, No-Turns Maze Problem

SDE II
09/02 Online Assessment
09/16 Phone Screen

20 minutes of deep-diving into my resume — tech stack choices, trade-offs, business logic, which part I was specifically responsible for, plus 2 Leadership Principles.

40 minutes of coding.

I couldn't find the original problem online — it was a BFS reachability problem with direction vectors. X means you can't walk there, 0 means you can.

Constraints
You can't backtrack, and
you can't turn left or right — find whether it's reachable.

e.g.
0 0 0 0 0 0
0 X 0 0 D 0
0 0 0 0 X 0
0 S X 0 0 0

Summary

Honestly, for the coding problem, I already knew the direction to take the moment I saw it. Of the 40 minutes, 20 were spent communicating — explaining my thinking. Pretty much every few lines I wrote, the interviewer would ask why I wrote it that way and whether it was right. By the time I finished coding at the very end, there was no time left to walk through the code, and during the wrap-up review I realized I'd gotten the 3D vector storage wrong.