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Amazon interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview

SDE - 1

Amazon
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5 rounds | 9 Coding problems

Interview preparation journey

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Journey
I joined a tier 3 college and worked hard to master DSA. I got placed in a startup initially. Along with my job, I used to practise DSA so that I can apply for product-based companies as well. Finally, I got a chance to apply for Amazon. I revised all the main DSA algorithms and gave some mock interviews in order to prepare well.
Application story
I started updating my resume and profile on Naukri.com due to which the companies started to contact me for the required jobs. Luckily my resume got shortlisted and was asked by the HR to go through the all the rounds.
Why selected/rejected for the role?
I was selected because I had in-depth understanding of DSA topics. Moreover, I knew everything that I had worked on in my previous company. So, I was able to answer all questions clearly and confidently.
Preparation
Duration: 7
Topics: Data Structures, Algorithms, OOPS, Graphs, Trees
Tip
Tip

Tip 1 : Start with the basics if you have lost touch with competitive coding. Don't directly jump to interview questions.
Tip 2 : Create a timetable and set goals. Keep aside 3-4 hours for studying. Consistency is the key.
Tip 3 : Focus on medium and hard questions. Solving a lot of easy questions doesn't help.

Application process
Where: Naukri
Eligibility: None
Resume Tip
Resume tip

Tip 1 : You should have good projects to showcase.
Tip 2 : Keep it clean and simple.

Interview rounds

01
Round
Easy
Online Coding Test
Duration90
Interview date6 Sep 2020
Coding problem2

Two coding questions were asked and 90 minutes of time was allotted to solve both the problems

1. Two Sum

Easy
10m average time
90% success
0/40
Asked in companies
ThalesSamsung R&D InstituteNatwest Group

You are given an array of integers 'ARR' of length 'N' and an integer Target. Your task is to return all pairs of elements such that they add up to Target.

Note:

We cannot use the element at a given index twice.

Follow Up:

Try to do this problem in O(N) time complexity. 
Problem approach

Sort the array and find the target sum with 2 pointer technique.

Try solving now

2. Shortest Path in a Binary Matrix

Moderate
37m average time
65% success
0/80
Asked in companies
SamsungGoogleOracle

You have been given a binary matrix of size 'N' * 'M' where each element is either 0 or 1. You are also given a source and a destination cell, both of them lie within the matrix.

Your task is to find the length of the shortest path from the source cell to the destination cell only consisting of 1s. If there is no path from source to destination cell, return -1.

Note:
1. Coordinates of the cells are given in 0-based indexing.
2. You can move in 4 directions (Up, Down, Left, Right) from a cell.
3. The length of the path is the number of 1s lying in the path.
4. The source cell is always filled with 1.
For example -
1 0 1
1 1 1
1 1 1
For the given binary matrix and source cell(0,0) and destination cell(0,2). Few valid paths consisting of only 1s are

X 0 X     X 0 X 
X X X     X 1 X 
1 1 1     X X X 
The length of the shortest path is 5.
Problem approach

Solved it using BFS. Created a queue. First added the source cell to the queue and distance as 0. In the loop(with loop being empty as terminating condition.), popped a cell and distance. Added its neighboring cells containing 1 or 3 and distance+1. Marked the cells as visited.
If the popped cell is the destination, then returned the distance.

Try solving now
02
Round
Medium
Video Call
Duration60
Interview date13 Sep 2020
Coding problem2

The duration was approx 1 hour. The interview was taken by a young SDE-2.

1. Count Frequency

Easy
15m average time
85% success
0/40
Asked in companies
Tech MahindraCognizantHewlett Packard Enterprise

You are given a string 'S' of length 'N', you need to find the frequency of each of the characters from ‘a’ to ‘z’ in the given string.

Example :

Given 'S' : abcdg
Then output will be : 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 
Try solving now

2. Fire in the cells.

Hard
15m average time
85% success
0/120
Asked in companies
AmazonPaytm (One97 Communications Limited)VMware Inc

You are given a matrix 'MAT' of size ‘N’ * ‘M’, where ‘N’ is the number of rows and ‘M’ is the number of columns. Value ‘0’ in a cell represents that the cell is set on fire initially, (at time t = ‘0’), and the cells which don’t have fire initially have value = ‘1’, and are called safe cells.

If a cell is on fire, then in one second the fire will expand to its adjacent cells (left, right, top, bottom) if they are not already on fire.

You are given the position of a person as integers ‘X’ and ‘Y’ denoting the cell (‘X’, ‘Y’). In one second the person can move from its current cell to any one of its adjacent cells, provided they are not on fire.

You have to determine if the person can move through the matrix to one of the escape cells without burning himself i.e. without going through the fire cells. If it’s possible, return time taken, else return -1.

Note:

1. Escape cells in this problem are all such cells that lie on the edge of the matrix but not on the corner. i.e all such cells which are in the first row, first column, last row, and last column excluding the four corner cells are considered as valid escape cells.

2. A cell once set on fire continues to remain on fire till the end.

3. Note that rows are indexed from 0 to ‘N’ - 1 and columns are indexed from 0 to ‘M’ - 1.

4. The escape cells may also be initially on fire or can catch fire from some neighboring cell.
Problem approach

Solved using BFS. Maintained 2 queues this time, one for fire cells and another for movement cells.
Returned True if the person reaches an edge cell. Mark each firing cell, visited cell, and movement cell as 0 so that it is not added to the movement queue going ahead. Initially added all the fire cells to the fire queue. In one iteration, add the possible safe cells to the movement queue and then add adjacent cells for the fire to fire queue. If the value of the cell popped from the movement queue is 0 then continue else explore its adjacent cells. Used concept of levels(extra loop for cells at a level) in BFS.

Try solving now
03
Round
Hard
Video Call
Duration60
Interview date13 Sep 2020
Coding problem2

The interviewer introduced himself and asked me to introduce myself.
I told him about the different projects that I had done and the work in the previous company.
I had worked on AWS(Amazon Web Services) so he asked me all the AWS services that I had worked with and to explain one of them. 
I explained about the working of ECS(Elastic Container Service).
After this, he moved to the coding questions.

1. Maximum 0-1 Distance

Hard
10m average time
85% success
0/120
Asked in company
Amazon

You are given an N*M binary matrix, considering for every 0-cell(cell with value = 0) the distance from this cell to its nearest 1-cell(cell with value = 1) is 'di', you need to find the maximum value of 'di' among all values of 'di'. Formally, if the minimum distance from an 'ith' 0-cell to any 1-cell is ‘di’, you need to find max(di), where i belongs to the set of all 0-cells in the matrix.

Distance between cells (i,j) and (a,b) is given as (|i-a| + |j-b|) i.e the manhattan distance is considered here.

altImage

Here, the arrows starting from the 0-cell’s point towards their corresponding nearest one cell, and among all of these, the arrow in purple and orange gives the maximum distance, i.e., 2.

Note:

1) Binary matrix of size N*M is a matrix with N rows and M columns, in which all the cells have either value 0 or 1.
2) Nearest 1-cell from a 0-cell is the cell that contains 1 and is at least a distance from the 0-cell being considered among all the other cells. For example consider the matrix {{0,1},{0,1}}. Here the nearest 1-cell for the 0-cell at index(0,0) is the 1-cell at index (0,1) because this cell is at least distance from the 0-cell being considered as the distance from the other 1-cell at index(1,1) is 2, whereas the distance from the 1-cell at index (0,1) is 1.
3) If there are no 1-cells or no 0-cells in the matrix, return -1.
Problem approach

Solved using BFS. Initialize distances for all zeroes to be infinity. Add 0 cell to queue if the distance is less than the already calculated distance. Used extra loop for levels in BFS. When the queue gets empty, the last level gives the maximum distance

Try solving now

2. Search for integers with given difference and at given distance

Moderate
20m average time
85% success
0/80
Asked in company
Amazon

You are given an array consisting of 'N' non-negative integers, and two non-negative integers 'K' and 'M', your task is to find a pair of indices(say i and j) from the array such that ‘i’ ≠ ‘j’, |Ai-Aj| <= 'M', and |i-j| <= 'K', where |a-b| represents the absolute value of a-b.

Note :

1) The array may contain duplicate elements.
2) The size of the array is at least 2.
3) The given array follows 0-based indexing so 0 <= i,j< N.
4) It is guaranteed that there exist at least one such pair of indices.
Problem approach

As we traverse the array, maintain another array that stores the last k elements in ascending order. Find the position of the current element in the sorted array and check the absolute difference between the preceding and next element. If the absolute difference is less than equal to t then return the two values. Remove element at i-k from sorted array.
Time Complexity: O( n log(k) ), where n is the length of the given array.

Try solving now
04
Round
Medium
Video Call
Duration60
Interview date17 Sep 2020
Coding problem1

The interviewer was a very senior person with at least 10-15 years of experience. He introduced himself and asked me to tell him about myself. (Leadership principle questions followed)
 

1. Special Binary Tree.

Easy
15m average time
90% success
0/40
Asked in companies
AmazonWipro

You are given an arbitrary binary tree. A binary tree is called special if every node of this tree has either zero or two children. You have to determine if the given binary tree is special or not.

If the given binary tree is special, return True. Else, return False to the given function.

Note:

1. A binary tree is a tree in which each node can have at most two children. 
2. The given tree will be non-empty i.e the number of non-NULL nodes will always be greater than or equal to 1.
3. Multiple nodes in the tree can have the same values, all values in the tree will be positive.
Problem approach

Solved using DFS. Similar to mirror trees. Pass root left and root right as arguments to the is _mirror_tree function. First explained the approach to the interviewer. He was satisfied and asked me to write code.
 

Try solving now
05
Round
Medium
Video Call
Duration60
Interview date28 Sep 2020
Coding problem2

The interview started with introductions and some Leadership principle questions. The interviewer was again a senior person with at least 10-15 years of experience.

I was asked to explain some AWS services.
He asked me to tell about a time when I had a tight deadline and how I worked during it.
He asked me about a time when I took initiative and came up with something new which helped the entire team.
I had prepared well for the LP questions and was able to answer everything.
After this, we move on to coding questions.

1. Check if the Word is present in Sentence or not

Easy
15m average time
90% success
0/40
Asked in companies
AmazonWalmartIntuit

You have been given a sentence ‘S’ in the form of a string and a word ‘W’, you need to find whether the word is present in the given sentence or not. The word must be present as a complete string in the sentence and not a substring of some other word.

Note:

1. All the characters in the string and the word are in lowercase.
2. Length of the sentences and the words will always be greater than zero.
3. Words in the sentence will be separated by spaces.
Problem approach

Discussed the solution using the hash map. He was convinced and asked me to code. I wrote a well-commented code and he was happy with it.

Try solving now

2. LRU Cache Implementation

Moderate
25m average time
65% success
0/80
Asked in companies
FlipkartCIS - Cyber InfrastructureIntuit

Design and implement a data structure for Least Recently Used (LRU) cache to support the following operations:

1. get(key) - Return the value of the key if the key exists in the cache, otherwise return -1.

2. put(key, value), Insert the value in the cache if the key is not already present or update the value of the given key if the key is already present. When the cache reaches its capacity, it should invalidate the least recently used item before inserting the new item.
You will be given ‘Q’ queries. Each query will belong to one of these two types:
Type 0: for get(key) operation.
Type 1: for put(key, value) operation.
Note :
1. The cache is initialized with a capacity (the maximum number of unique keys it can hold at a time).

2. Access to an item or key is defined as a get or a put operation on the key. The least recently used key is the one with the oldest access time.
Problem approach

I had solved it earlier and explained to him the approach using doubly Linked List and Hash map.
He was convinced with my approach and asked me to code it without using any in-built data types. He asked me to write classes. I had prepared the solution with classes and started writing the code.

Try solving now

Here's your problem of the day

Solving this problem will increase your chance to get selected in this company

What does ROLLBACK do in DBMS?

Join the Discussion
4 replies
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Channurani |Level 5
23 Jan 2023
Edited

Thank you for giving tips for Preparation 

Helpful

1 upvote
1 reply
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28 Aug 2021

they have asked u only Btech academics or 12th and 10th alsoand how they are selecting by Btech cgpa or 12th & 10th

 

3 upvotes
0 replies
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18 Aug 2021

How can we prepare for LP questions

0 upvotes
0 replies
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15 Jan 2021

Hello

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