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Interview experiences
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Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Online Assessment with a Merge-Strings Conflict Problem and an AI Spring Boot Bug-Fix Task
CODE Given two strings (lowercase English letters), primary and secondary, with lengths m and n respectively, try to merge them into one string: Keep the original order within each string A smaller character has higher priority A conflict is defined as the case where a character with low priority is merged before a character with high priority in the final merged string. For example, if the merge…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Passing the SDE II Phone Screen After Leadership and Palindrome Questions
I interviewed for the Amazon SDE II position on August 29, 2026. The technical phone screen lasted about an hour. Interview Questions Behavioral: 3 behavioral questions The questions were primarily focused on Amazon Leadership Principles, especially Ownership and Dive Deep I would recommend preparing specific STAR-format examples from your past projects and being ready for follow-up questions. Co…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Phone Screen Package Installer, Onsite Topological Sort
Phone Interview Given a mapping (Map / Adjacency List) of software packages and their dependencies, write a class or method to install a specified package along with all of its dependencies. Assume each package object has an install() method that only installs that package itself and does not handle its dependencies. Need to implement an installWithDependencies(package) method that makes sure all…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Recruiter Gave a Last-Minute Ultimatum for the Only Onsite Slot
I still don't know why they gave me SDE1 despite having 1.5 years of experience. The recruiter was toxic — no response the day I reached out, and then the next morning, before I was even out of bed, they called me and said there was only one interview slot available, and if that didn't work for me they'd just reject me. So I basically got pushed into it with no time to prepare. I interviewed last…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Robot Coordination and File-Watcher Design
The author describes a first-round Amazon phone interview organized into technical questions followed by leadership-focused discussion. The applicant reports completing an initial coding problem quickly. Additional technical topics concerned coordinating multiple robots in a restaurant and designing a Kafka-related file-watching system that could handle millions of files. The robot scenario requi…
Interview experiences · Amazon
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. Constrai…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview experience: systems prompts and declined offer
After a recruiter-style start, I went straight into a technical process that felt brutal because the hard topics kept piling up. One design prompt asked me to work through a concurrent restaurant waitlist and seating system, which meant reasoning about correctness and coordination instead of reaching for a quick answer. Next came a weighted binary-grid pathfinding problem that tested my algorithm…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Onsite Rounds of BQ, Coding, and OOD
Round 1: Asked 6 behavioral questions, covering a pretty wide range. The ones I remember are: How to handle a tight deadline Proactively helping others (help others) Digging into a problem's root cause (deep dive) How to handle disagreeing with a colleague (conflict with colleague) Doing something outside your scope (outside your scope) How to respond to negative/harsh feedback Round 2: Two codin…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Three Onsite Rounds With a Bar Raiser and Nonstop BQ Challenges
Round 1 (possibly a bar raiser): The interviewer gave me 2 BQs and 2 coding questions. BQ1: tell me about your project... follow up... BQ2: don't remember. Coding1: given an int array where only one number appears an odd number of times, find and return that number. I used a hash table -> follow-up: how do you optimize the space complexity to O(1)? I got stuck on this one for a while, we went bac…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Leadership Principles and Two Whiteboard Problems
Before the interview, the recruiter scheduled a call and said the interview would focus mainly on two Leadership Principles. The recruiter suggested preparing the related behavioral questions in advance using the STAR format. The first behavioral portion stayed mostly around those two Leadership Principles. After the first question, the interviewer dug further into the trade-off, so that discussi…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Two Online Assessment Questions on Calorie-Maximizing Jumps and Password Similarity
Question 1: Problem description: A user is doing jump exercises using an Amazon fitness tracker. There are n blocks of different heights (height[i] is the height of the i-th block). The user starts from the ground (height 0) and must jump to every block exactly once, with the goal of maximizing calories burned. The calories burned jumping from block i to block j are calculated as (height[i] - hei…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Virtual Onsite with BQ, an OO Ticket System, and a Recommendation Engine
This was a virtual onsite. The interviewer told me right away that he'd be taking a lot of notes, so I shouldn't read too much into it. BQ section: The first question was on "Ownership" — he asked if I'd ever run into something that wasn't technically part of my responsibilities but I went ahead and took care of it anyway. The second was "Deliver Results" — he asked for an example of delivering s…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Withdrew from the SDE II Virtual Onsite
Some details have been intentionally obscured. HR reached out on LinkedIn. I ignored the first message, but then they messaged once a week for the next two weeks. I wasn't doing much, so I thought I might as well interview and see. At the end of July, I took the OA for position one and received a phone-screen invitation the next day. One question involved a drone delivering packages clockwise aro…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: four friendly interviews over two days
I completed four friendly Amazon interviews, each about an hour, over two days. The questions covered system design, LeetCode-style coding, behavioral topics, and my use of AI. The loop was long but not especially difficult. Because the tone stayed approachable, I could focus on explaining my thought process instead of only racing to write code. I left with a clearer sense of the balance they wan…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: four in-person behavioral and technical rounds
After finishing my online assessment, I heard back roughly a month later and moved into four in-person rounds. The process felt smooth, and everyone I met was professional and friendly. A lunch break in the middle helped me between interviews. One round was purely behavioral, while the others combined behavioral and technical components. The behavioral prompts were more situational than I expecte…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: four-interview loop and leadership principles
I took an online assessment and, about a week later, had four interviews in a single day. The recruiter stayed responsive throughout, which helped me understand what each round would look like. The onsite loop ran back to back and followed the Amazon loop format closely. I had coding-and-judgment moments mixed with Leadership Principles. One round was more team or hiring-manager focused, while an…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: four-round onsite loop with bar raiser
I went through a four-round loop spread across two onsite rounds. Each interview mixed behavioral questions with a technical segment, except for one that was behavioral-only. The technical topics included strings, priority queues, and object-oriented design. A bar-raiser-style round was part of the loop and felt notably harder than the others. Even with the mix of topics, the structure was consis…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: HackerRank, AI assistance and a next-day rejection
I first took a HackerRank take-home exam and did not solve everything perfectly, which worried me early. The next step involved AI assistance, but the tool felt almost intentionally unhelpful. It did not seem to move me toward the answer even though I was supposed to be able to use it. I still advanced to an interview with LeetCode-style questions and discussion of my experience. The pace was qui…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: HackerRank OA and pending update
After applying, I took an Amazon online assessment on HackerRank. The DSA section was heavy on prefixes and patterns, with a problem that felt like something in the longest-happy-prefix family. The next part involved debugging code. I did well there, so the overall assessment felt manageable even though the DSA question itself was a grind. When I checked my DSA performance, the test coverage did…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: leadership-principle loop
Amazon's loop was four to five back-to-back interviews, roughly 45 to 60 minutes each. The panel included a potential hiring manager, one or two team members, a senior leader, and a bar raiser. The pace was relentless because I had to stay sharp across several perspectives. Leadership Principles were spread across the panel. Each interviewer owned a couple, and together they covered all of them.…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: LeetCode and leadership pressure
My first interview was about an hour and had two easy LeetCode-style questions. The final stage was tougher: two separate LeetCode sessions, a system-design session, and an LLD session. Leadership Principle prompts came up in every session, so it was never only about getting a solution. The technical questions were easy to medium overall, but the leadership questions were harder for me. I also lo…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: math prompt and interactive implementation
I began with two practical programming questions that felt more like testing how I translate an idea into working code than trick problems. The first was straightforward math. The second was interactive: I had to work out what the interviewer wanted and implement several functions to reach the final behavior. The second question made the process difficult because it required more back-and-forth t…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview: monitored OAs and three-engineer panel coding
My first interaction was a phone screen, a precursor to a heavier assessment. I completed several webcam-monitored online assessments on coding, bug catching, and behavioral decision-making for culture fit. After clearing them, I had a panel interview with three engineers, taking turns one by one. Each interview had coding and behavioral parts, with segments of roughly 45 to 60 minutes. The OA in…
Interview experiences · Amazon
Amazon Software Engineer interview obtained through a hackathon with a friendly online coding round
I got the opportunity through an Amazon hackathon, and the process began with an online interview. The interviewer was friendly and easy to talk to, which helped because the session started with a simple introduction before moving into the questions. The coding portion felt medium difficulty overall. It was not the most intimidating format, but it still required me to explain myself clearly while…