Amazon SDE I Interview Experience: Phone Screen Through a Four-Round Onsite

AmazonSDE I·Not specified·Interviewed 2020No offer

Updated July 17, 2026

This candidate posted a recap of a job search season that included loops at Goldman Sachs, Amazon, Expedia, Intuit, and Oracle within a few months. Among the accounts, the Amazon SDE I loop stands out for its structure: a single phone screen followed by a four-round onsite that combined coding with Amazon's Leadership Principles in nearly every round.

The loop ended without an offer. The candidate pointed to two factors: the system design round was a weak spot given limited experience, and the interviewer appeared to calibrate that round as if the candidate already had a couple of years on the job, which raised the bar for what was expected.

How the process went

Phone screen
A single technical screen: print the Next Greater Element (NGE) for every element in an array, plus a set of Leadership Principles questions.
Onsite round 1
Coding problem on merging k sorted iterators, paired with more Leadership Principles questions.
Onsite round 2
Design an LRU cache, again paired with Leadership Principles questions.
Onsite round 3
An open-ended system design question; the candidate felt the interviewer assumed more hands-on experience than they had.
Onsite round 4
A coding problem counting connected regions of matching pixels (a variant of the Number of Islands problem), with follow-ups on area and perimeter.
Outcome
Rejected. The candidate attributed the result mainly to the system design round and to being read as more senior than they were.

Phone screen

Coding + Leadership Principles

Print the Next Greater Element (NGE) for every element in an array.
Standard Leadership Principles behavioral questions.

Onsite round 1

Coding + Leadership Principles

Merge k sorted iterators.
Leadership Principles behavioral questions.

Onsite round 2

Data structure design + Leadership Principles

Design an LRU cache.
Leadership Principles behavioral questions.

Onsite round 3

System design

An open-ended system design question.

The candidate felt the interviewer pitched this round as if they had about two years of professional experience, which they did not have.

Onsite round 4

Coding (graph/matrix)

Count the number of connected regions of matching pixels, similar to the Number of Islands problem.
Follow-up: find the maximum area among the connected regions.
Follow-up: compute the perimeter of a region.

Key takeaways

Amazon's SDE I loop wove Leadership Principles questions into almost every round rather than isolating them in one behavioral session, so it's worth preparing a few concrete stories to pair with each coding round.
If an interviewer seems to assume more experience than you actually have, later rounds like system design can get harder to match - it may be worth clarifying your background early in the loop.
Grid and matrix traversal problems (counting connected regions, then computing area and perimeter as follow-ups) came up alongside classic array problems like Next Greater Element, so both patterns are worth practicing.
Running several company loops in the same stretch can make it easy to mix up which round belonged to which company, so it may help to keep short notes per company.

Source

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

Candidate's public write-up on LeetCode Discuss