Amazon SDE-1 Interview Experience — Hyderabad, 2020 (Offer)

How the process went

1. Application & recruiter contact

   Applied through Amazon's careers portal and got no response for about a month. A recruiter later noticed the candidate's profile on a job portal and reached out because it matched an open SDE-1 role.

2. Online Assessment

   A 90-minute test with two coding questions. Each round in the process was followed by a short debrief where the candidate had to explain the approach and its time and space complexity.

3. Two technical interviews

   Scheduled back-to-back on the same day, about a week after the online assessment. Both were conducted virtually over Amazon Chime with a shared codeshare link, one hour each.

4. Hiring Manager round

   Scheduled about three days after the technical interviews. Combined background and leadership-principle questions with one coding problem.

5. Bar Raiser round

   The final round, roughly ten days after the hiring manager round. Included more leadership-principle questions plus two coding problems.

6. Decision

   A confirmation call came about three days after the bar raiser round informing the candidate they had been selected.

Online Assessment

Two coding problems under time pressure · 90 minutes

• Given a list of song durations and a target journey length, pick two songs whose combined length finishes the trip with a fixed buffer to spare — a two-sum style problem solved by sorting and using two pointers.
• Find the shortest path between a source and destination in a grid, moving in four directions, solved with BFS.

A short debrief followed the coding portion, where the candidate had to explain the approach and its time and space complexity — a format repeated after every round in the process.

Technical Interview 1

Search and grid traversal problems on a shared codeshare link · 1 hour

• In a sorted string, count how many times a given character occurs, implemented with two binary-search helper functions marking the first and last occurrence.
• On a grid where some cells contain fire, determine whether a person starting at a given cell can reach the edge without passing through fire, solved with BFS.
• Follow-up: the fire spreads to adjacent cells each turn, so the search has to track fire and the person's movement together — a variant of the classic 'rotting oranges' pattern, handled with two queues.

The candidate made a point of covering edge cases and commenting the code before being asked, after the interviewer had flagged missing edge cases on the first question.

Technical Interview 2

Resume walkthrough plus BFS and sliding-window problems · 1 hour

• Walkthrough of AWS experience from the resume, including an explanation of how ECS (Elastic Container Service) works.
• In a binary matrix of 0s and 1s, find the maximum distance from any 0 cell to the nearest 1, solved with BFS (related to the '01 Matrix' problem, but looking for the farthest rather than nearest cell).
• Given an unsorted array and two integers k and t, find two indices i and j where the value difference is at most t and the index difference is at most k; asked to optimize past brute force toward roughly O(n log k) using a maintained sorted window.

The interviewer pointed out that inserting into the maintained sorted window was still an O(n) operation and wasn't fully satisfied with the fix; the candidate didn't close that gap before time ran out but still advanced to the next stage.

Hiring Manager Round

Background discussion and leadership-principle questions, plus one coding problem · 1 hour

• Questions about past college and work projects, technology choices, challenges faced, and reasons for wanting to leave the current company.
• Determine whether a given binary tree is symmetric when folded down the middle — a variant of the classic symmetric-tree check, solved recursively.

Most of the hour went to the background discussion rather than coding; the interviewer had significant industry experience and probed follow-ups closely.

Bar Raiser Round

Leadership-principle questions plus two coding problems · 1 hour

• Leadership-principle questions about handling a tight deadline and about a time the candidate took initiative that helped the team.
• Given a list of sentences, build an index mapping each word to the lines it appears in, solved with a hash map.
• Implement an LRU cache from scratch without built-in data structures, using a doubly linked list and hash map; the interviewer also asked about OOP concepts like polymorphism while the classes were being written.

The candidate didn't finish writing the LRU cache implementation before time ran out, but the interviewer said they were satisfied with the approach shown.

Source

The questions and process facts come from the candidate's public write-up, linked below. The retelling above is our own summary.