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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Director, product, and bar raiser sequence
The process was structured and tightly scheduled, with several human checkpoints. It began with a pre-interview screening with a hiring manager, followed by a recruiter screening call. Then I had an engineering-director discussion, a senior-product-owner conversation, and a senior-software-engineer round. After those came two bar-raiser style interviews and a final hiring-manager interview. By th…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: DSA, low-level design, and leadership principles
My process had four rounds. I began with DSA, then had two low-level-design rounds. One of those LLD conversations included gen-AI best practices, which was an unexpected addition to a systems-focused design interview. The final round was entirely about leadership principles and behavioral questions. Leadership-principles questions also appeared in the earlier technical rounds, so coding, design,…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: four demanding loop rounds
The process started with an online assessment and moved into four rounds: coding, deeper technical design, Leadership Principles, and another design round. The coding interview had two DSA problems, one medium and one hard. I had to solve them optimally, explain my approach, cover time and space complexity, edge cases, optimizations, alternatives, and trade offs. The design work covered an Amazon…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: four technical interviews with adaptive follow-ups
The process was organized, and recruiting communicated clearly throughout. Scheduling went smoothly apart from one interview I had to reschedule because of an interviewer emergency. The final set consisted of four technical interviews covering data structures and algorithms, object-oriented design, system design, and behavioral questions based on Amazon's Leadership Principles. The interviewers w…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: graduates OA with extreme first-task timing
I received an OA invite for a graduates program, and the timing was extreme. The first programming challenge had such a reduced window that I spent much of it reading and understanding the prompt rather than building a solution. The second test was more reasonable. The experience was very difficult for me, and I did not move forward to an offer. The bottleneck was not only coding ability. It was…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: leadership principles in a virtual loop
I spoke with a recruiter and, about 90 minutes later, completed an online assessment with two coding problems. A few behavioral prompts were built into that assessment, and even then I was thinking about Amazon Leadership Principles while solving. The virtual onsite was four back-to-back rounds of roughly an hour each. It included a two-question LeetCode-style coding round with one hard and one m…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Medium coding under a compressed but supportive schedule
My process began with a thorough, tightly paced phone interview. Segments ran back to back. I first worked through two medium LeetCode questions, each followed by probing about how I approached the problem end to end. Then I did workplace-style behavioral questions and a quick personality-type check about how I work and where I see my strengths. What stood out was the interviewers' tone. Even wit…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: missed interview and disputed absence
My interview fell apart because of a scheduling failure, not because of my answers. One interviewer never arrived. I told the recruiter and recruiting team, and provided evidence that I had been there, but I was still accused of missing the interview. I declined to reschedule and raised my concerns. After that, I was ignored and felt effectively blacklisted. The experience felt harsh and unfair b…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: OA score before resume discussion
My process began with an OA covering DSA and aptitude questions, followed by a technical interview with two easier DSA questions. I solved those questions, then discussed my resume and a RAG-model project I had built. The OA was the difficult part for me. Its questions threw me off even though they were not presented as extremely hard. My score was low enough that I did not progress from the OA,…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: progressive DSA OA and split Zoom interview
After applying, I received a virtual OA with several DSA problems that began easy and became much harder at the end. It felt like a test of endurance and correctness. The Zoom technical interview had a 30-minute LeetCode-medium coding segment followed by a 30-minute behavioral segment. I had to switch quickly between writing and discussing past work. The difficulty felt average. I did not receive…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Sliding window, binary search, and debugging
After completing my OA, I moved into a live technical screen with LeetCode-style problems. One used sliding-window logic and another used binary search. There was also a leadership-expectations conversation where I described a time I debugged an error: what went wrong, how I investigated it, and what I changed to prevent it from happening again. The pace was quick, so I had to stay with the main…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Streams and rate limiting
My process focused on data structures and low-level reasoning, with leadership and workplace questions alongside them. There was no bar raiser, so it felt less like a large gauntlet and more like direct technical checks plus LP questions. The OA included simulation-style grouping and sorting. In live interviews, I worked on finding the median of an integer stream and the K most frequent elements…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Three coding questions and system design
I began with an online coding test, followed by HR questions soon after I submitted it. Then I went into an in-person technical round. The in-person session was heavier than the initial screening. It included three coding questions and system-design topics. That caught me off guard because it was not only a DSA evaluation. It also tested how I would structure broader technical thinking. The proce…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: three mixed coding and behavioral rounds
My process began with an online assessment. After it, I had a loop of three one-hour interviews. Each round mixed coding and behavioral questions, so I could not separate the technical work from the leadership conversations. The coding felt easy to medium for me, and the behavioral prompts were woven into the same sessions. I left with a strong sense of what they were evaluating: how I thought th…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Time-boxed debugging
The memorable part of my process was a take-home-style coding and debugging assignment. It began with HackerRank-like tasks in about 40 minutes, followed by a debugging section. In one version, I spent about an hour fixing an unexpected API-call behavior in a repository-style project so every test would pass. It was difficult because it resembled real work: I had to find why a larger codebase did…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: two DSA problems with live complexity explanation
After a recruiter touchpoint, I had a virtual one-on-one technical interview with an engineer. It opened with a quick introduction and then became pure problem solving. I solved two separate DSA problems on a shared coding platform. As I worked, I had to keep talking and explain time and space complexity. That made the session about showing my reasoning in real time, not simply writing code. The…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Two timed DSA questions
I was given two DSA questions with 30 minutes for each. As I worked through them, I was also asked about the time complexity of my solutions and how I could optimize them. I did not make it past the first round, so I could not continue further. The difficulty felt high mainly because the timing pressure gave me little room to recover when a solution did not click as quickly as I wanted. No offer…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview experience: written problem-solving stage
The first test was assignment-like and covered a broad mix: Java depth questions, React, SQL, and some DevOps. After my first round, there was also a paper-based written problem-solving step. I was rejected at that written stage. I had traveled a long way for the interview and did not feel ready enough after dealing with the timing and logistics. With more than 40 hours spent traveling, I was not…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: four mixed technical and leadership rounds
I had four one-hour rounds that combined behavioral questions with technical work: behavioral, low-level design, DSA, and an AI-focused behavioral and DSA round. Amazon Leadership Principles appeared throughout rather than as an afterthought. The DSA portions used classic LeetCode-style problems. One technical conversation also went into networking, with follow-ups that deepened each answer. I us…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: four-round loop and bar raiser
After clearing the initial step, I entered a loop with multiple back-to-back interviews. It was the most intense part of the process. I had four rounds, each combining behavioral questions with a technical component, except for one that leaned behavioral-only as a structured readout of how I would operate. The technical topics included strings, priority queues, and object-oriented design. A bar-r…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: large project under artificial time pressure
The interview felt deliberately brutal and high-pressure. The format was streamlined, but it mixed behavioral and technical questions with an artificial time constraint, something like 60 minutes for a massive project. It felt designed to see whether I would break under pressure and matched the reputation I associated with a high-attrition hiring model, even though the process itself was not chao…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: linked-list final after coding
I cleared an initial coding round by solving two questions, then moved to one technical interview lasting about an hour. That interview had a single linked-list question, and the setup felt straightforward compared with the earlier assessment. I was still rejected. What stayed with me was how quickly one problem became the final decision. There was not much room to recover from even a slight mism…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: open-ended behavioral loop
My interview had two distinct parts. One leaned more behavioral than I expected, and another was a LeetCode-style technical question. The behavioral prompts were situational. Instead of asking for polished, closed-form answers, they asked me to explain how I would think through open-ended scenarios. Communication became central because it felt like they wanted my reasoning, not just a final concl…
Interview experiences · Amazon Advertising
Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: STAR examples, coding and debugging
I passed an online assessment combining coding with behavioral questions about Amazon Leadership Principles. The next interviews used an in-person-style format over video. The first focused mostly on leadership principles, my experience and previous projects. Toward the end of the loop, I worked through a system-design coding problem and had more hands-on technical discussions with engineers. I e…