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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Segmented-Array OA Problem That Even ChatGPT Couldn't Solve
I got Amazon's OA and started it one day right after waking up from a nap. I wasn't in a good state though, and I ended up getting a rejection. Question 1 Coding, 40 minutes. I wrote one version and only passed 4 cases — the other hidden cases threw some memory errors. It wasn't until after it ended that I realized there must have been a space constraint, which is why I was getting those memory-r…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — A Sparse Sliding Window Over Infinite Bags
The first online-assessment question was set in Amazon's financial team. An analyst had an infinite line of bags numbered from 1 onward. Information about the money in the bags was given as continuous, nonintersecting segments. Every bag inside a segment held the segment's stated amount, while every bag outside the supplied segments held zero. The goal was to choose exactly k consecutive bags tha…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience: a virtual onsite across coding, system design, and behavioral work
I began with an online assessment, then moved into a virtual onsite with multiple rounds. The onsite felt like a continuous loop rather than isolated checks. I kept switching between coding, system design, and behavioral questions. The interviewers also explored my prior experience and projects, so I had to explain my background and decisions as well as solve questions. The difficulty felt tough,…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Ambiguous Word-Combination Problem, Rejected After a Rocky Phone Screen
Got rejected from the phone screen — I saw it on the portal before I even got the email. The interviewer opened with a hard problem, similar to a LeetCode problem, but it required outputting the actual combinations. It was really strange — the problem didn't say whether the word had to be in the given list, how many times each word could be used, or whether repeats were allowed. I asked him about…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Bar Raiser Behavioral Marathon, a Parking Lot OOD, and Route-Planning Coding
Round 1: it went straight into bar raiser mode, five BQs back to back for the whole round, totally overwhelmed me. The ones I roughly remember: most interesting/proud project, dealing with ambiguity, conflict/different opinions, how to make your work more efficient (something like that? I used "prioritize things"), and the most challenging thing you've dealt with. Tons of follow-ups, and the inte…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Boomerang Loop With a Surprise ML Platform System Design
HR reached out about a boomerang interview, two rounds. Round 1: 20 minutes of behavioral questions, 30 minutes of coding. The questions weren't hard, but there were two of them. The first one gave me a graph and asked me to print the shortest path — not hard, but the messed up part was there was no problem description, I had to guess it myself, and there was also some distracting code mixed in t…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience: Coding, debugging, and behavioral checks
The early stages mixed quick screening with focused technical checks. I had a phone interview of about 45 minutes, split between behavioral questions and a coding problem with follow-ups. The interviewer was warm and nice, which made it easier to think. Earlier in the pipeline, I also remember a quick chat, an OA, more behavioral questions, and then a technical round with medium LeetCode question…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience: coding rounds with leadership questions
The schedule was four rounds of about an hour each. Three were coding-focused, and the last was system design. Every round also contained roughly 25 minutes of Leadership Principles questions. The coding was mostly LeetCode easy to medium, so the larger pressure came from handling leadership prompts while still producing clean solutions. I did not receive an offer. I felt the format did not allow…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Distracted Interviewer Nitpicks a Binary Search
First off, the interviewer was 30 minutes late. The scheduled time was already inconvenient, and then he pulls this on top of it. He started by going over my resume, and we talked for over half an hour. The interviewer was obviously distracted the whole time, kept asking me to re-explain things I had already explained, and wasted a lot of time going back and forth like that. Then out of nowhere h…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Five Onsite Rounds, LPs Woven Into Every One
Preparing for Amazon took me a good amount of time, and threads on this forum helped a ton, so I'm back to turn in my homework. Before I get into it: the biggest difference between Amazon and other companies is that Leadership Principles aren't a separate round — they're baked into every single round. Across my five rounds, every one of them started with twenty to thirty minutes of LP questions b…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience: four mixed behavioral and technical rounds
I had four rounds: behavioral, low-level design, DSA, and a hybrid round combining AI-style behavioral questions with DSA. Each included at least five to 10 minutes of behavioral discussion, so none of the technical rounds was purely technical. Most of the process felt fair. The disruption came in the third round, where the interviewer had connection problems and did not seem to fully understand…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four Onsite Rounds From Ride-Hailing System Design to a Pub/Sub OOD Question
Phone Screen Coding: Merge products by category. Given a bunch of tuples representing two products being in the same category, with transitivity, find how many categories there are in the end and the size of each group. Classic Union-Find — I solved it with BFS instead and it also passed. Onsite (4 rounds) System Design: Design a ride-hailing app. The core focus was on high-frequency GPS writes f…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four Rounds with Detailed Behavioral Questions
The author describes four Amazon virtual-onsite interviews for an SDE2 role, each combining behavioral discussion with technical work. The technical topics were dependency ordering and selective reruns, a high-volume inventory-update service, an extensible document-search library, and merging timestamp-ordered event streams without loading everything into memory. Behavioral questions examined inv…
Interview experiences · Amazon
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…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview experience: LP-focused OA loop
I went through an OA-style loop that focused heavily on a weakness of mine: LP. The coding questions were not my main concern because they were relatively straightforward LeetCode-style problems. The interviewers spent about half an hour on linear-programming scenarios and another half hour on coding questions in the same general LeetCode style. That pattern came up across two rounds, so LP was n…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview experience: LRU cache implementation details
After I cleared the initial steps, I had a phone-screen-style discussion that ran longer than expected and went deeply into implementation. The interviewer pressed me on an LRU cache: how I would combine a hashmap and doubly linked list, and how eviction would work. System-design examples on eviction policies had helped me prepare, so I could explain the reasoning instead of reciting a solution.…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview experience: maximal square and good nodes
I interviewed for an SDE1 role at Amazon. The early process centered on DSA and, after applying, I went through two technical rounds with different coding challenges. The first included maximal square and merge intervals, which called for DP or matrix reasoning and careful interval manipulation. In the second, the questions shifted to something like counting good nodes in a binary tree, so I was…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview experience: month-long wait before final round
I began with an online assessment that combined technical questions with managerial and behavioral components. Then I waited about a month for an online final-round interview. The final round also mixed technical and behavioral questions. It felt like they were judging both how I solved problems and how I communicated through my experience. The structure itself was straightforward, but I kept hav…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — OA in April, Offer After Four VO Rounds in July
Mass-applied at the end of January. Got the OA at the end of April: Coding question 1: there's an original version of this on the forum — a circular array of drone destinations (first and last connected end to end), find the shortest path. Coding question 2: AI debug. I picked Java. The problem was an actor + movie website. Roughly the functionality: users can follow actors, and an admin can add…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience: OA with AI website debugging
The process began with an online assessment with several parts, then moved to interviews. The OA included medium-to-hard DSA problems, a work simulation where a website had a bug and I was expected to use AI to work through it, and several behavioral, situation-focused questions. The interview stages had a similar emphasis on scenarios and problem framing rather than one isolated coding question.…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — One Virtual Onsite Round with BQ Drill-downs and a Checkout Price Engine OOD
Three BQ questions: Q1: Can you tell me about a time when you pushed back against a decision that negatively impacted your team? What was the issue? How did it turn out? Q2: Can you tell me about a time when a system was failing intermittently, and the very obvious metrics were all looking good? How did you find the root cause, and how long did it take? Q3: Can you tell me about a problem you had…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Online Assessment Coding Question on Maximizing a Bitwise AND
Fresh out of the oven. I found the coding question really confusing. I spent a long time thinking and guessing, and I guessed bitwise AND, which turned out to be wrong. Afterwards I went back over it with Claude, and the approach it gave me was greedy + bit manipulation. Here is the summary: Problem: Given an array Arr, a count K, and a budget C. You can distribute C total "capacity" as increases…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Online Assessment with a Coordinate-Compression Problem and a Debugging Task
One algorithm question, one project question, an AI-coding debug round. Q1: There are infinitely many bags in a row. Each segment [l, r, v] means bags l through r each hold v dollars. Segments do not overlap, and empty bags count as 0. Pick k consecutive bags and find the maximum total amount, mod 1e9+7. Constraints: n <= 2e5, and k and the coordinates go up to 1e9. Similar to LC 3413. Example: k…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Online Assessment with a Django Debug Round
40 min Coding. It was pretty hard, the approach was greedy + bit manipulation. Feels like Amazon doesn't want to hire anyone, lol 60 min Debug. This one is tricky, so let me roughly go over my approach: The second part is an existing Django project, and you have to debug it based on the failing tests. You are not asked to write Django from scratch. The debug order I'd recommend is: Test → URL → V…