I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2025
Interview
Timeline:
Online Assessment: January 2025
Loop Interviews: April 2025
Round 1 – Technical + Behavioral (SDE-2)
Duration: 1 hour
0.5 hr Behavioral: Focus on Amazon Leadership Principles. Asked about ownership, bias for action, and delivering results.
0.5 hr Technical: Unbounded Knapsack problem – minimize box combinations to reach a target.
-I explained the brute-force recursive approach, then optimized using top-down DP with memoization.
Follow-up: Asked to modify the solution for Bounded Knapsack (each box can be used only certain no of times).
Round 2 – Managerial Round
Duration: 1 hour
Experience: Disorganized and unclear.
-Interviewer was confused, used a personal laptop, and struggled with tech setup (mic/camera on/off).
-No question was shared via the code editor.
-Verbally described a vague Elevator System Design OOP problem and kept adding unrelated helper methods.
-Frequent interruptions, poor structure, and lack of clarity.
Feedback: Amazon should evaluate interviewers based on their ability to conduct structured, effective interviews—not solely on seniority.
Round 3 – Technical + Behavioral (SDE-2)
Duration: 1 hour
0.5 hr Behavioral:
Question 1: Delivered a critical project under a tight deadline. Asked to elaborate on trade-offs and sacrifices made.
Question 2: Made a long-term decision sacrificing short-term gain. Asked to explain the rationale and business impact.
0.5 hr Technical:
Simulated Unix find command functionality.
1: Search and return all files over a certain size ( 5MB) in a directory tree.
2: Search and return all .xml files in a directory.
-Implemented recursive DFS traversal with filtering logic.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical rounds were structured and focused with clear problem statements. However, the managerial round was disorganized and poorly executed—Amazon should ensure senior-level interviewers are prepared and not improvising mid-interview.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.