Amazon interview experience Real time questions & tips from candidates to crack your interview
System Development Engineer
Amazon
2 rounds | 3 Coding
problems
Selected Interview preparation journey
Journey
After receiving Amazon's interview invitation, I devoted four months to rigorous preparation. I practiced on coding platforms daily, focusing on data structures and algorithms, while spending my evenings studying system design and Amazon's leadership principles.
The interview day consisted of two rounds: technical coding sessions, system design, and behavioral questions. The coding rounds tested my graph and dynamic programming skills, while the system design round involved creating a scalable notification system. During the behavioral rounds, I shared concrete examples that aligned with Amazon's culture.
I maintained clear communication throughout, discussed trade-offs, and demonstrated genuine enthusiasm. One week later, I received the exciting news—I cleared the interview! The preparation was intense, but it was absolutely worth it.
Application story
I was already an Amazon employee, working as a Cloud Support Engineer. I did an internal switch and had a few DSA screening rounds.
Why selected/rejected for the role?
I was selected because I was strong in DSA concepts and had prior experience as well. I was able to answer almost all the questions they asked, whether they were related to my previous role or the core concepts.
Preparation
Duration: 4 months
Topics: OOP, System Design, Data Structures, BFS, DFS, Algorithms.
Tip 1: Do not panic when you encounter a question you've never seen before.
Tip 2: Remember, if nothing works, brute force is your friend.
Tip 3: Set a target.
Application process
Where: Campus
Eligibility: Prior development experience, (Salary Package: 21 LPA)
Tip 1: Make sure your resume is short and crisp.
Tip 2: Ensure your ATS score isn't low.
Interview rounds
01
Round
Medium
Face to Face
Duration60 minutes
Interview date9 Oct 2024
Coding problem1
It was a coding round.
1. House Robber II
Moderate
15m average time
80% success
0/80
Asked in companies
Mr. X is a professional robber planning to rob houses along a street. Each house has a certain amount of money hidden.
All houses along this street are arranged in a circle. That means the first house is the neighbour of the last one. Meanwhile, adjacent houses have a security system connected, and it will automatically contact the police if two adjacent houses are broken into on the same night.
You are given an array/list of non-negative integers 'ARR' representing the amount of money of each house. Your task is to return the maximum amount of money Mr. X can rob tonight without alerting the police.
Note:
It is possible for Mr. X to rob the same amount of money by looting two different sets of houses. Just print the maximum possible robbed amount, irrespective of sets of houses robbed.
For example:
(i) Given the input array arr[] = {2, 3, 2} the output will be 3 because Mr X cannot rob house 1 (money = 2) and then rob house 3 (money = 2), because they are adjacent houses. So, he’ll rob only house 2 (money = 3)
(ii) Given the input array arr[] = {1, 2, 3, 1} the output will be 4 because Mr X rob house 1 (money = 1) and then rob house 3 (money = 3).
(iii) Given the input array arr[] = {0} the output will be 0 because Mr. X has got nothing to rob.
Problem approach
I wrote the brute force approach, optimized it using DSA, and checked for edge cases."
02
Round
Medium
Face to Face
Duration90 minutes
Interview date17 Oct 2024
Coding problem2
I was asked two questions: one was based on the BFS algorithm, and the second was on DP.
1. First Missing Positive
Moderate
18m average time
84% success
0/80
Asked in companies
You are given an array 'ARR' of integers of length N. Your task is to find the first missing positive integer in linear time and constant space. In other words, find the lowest positive integer that does not exist in the array. The array can have negative numbers as well.
For example, the input [3, 4, -1, 1] should give output 2 because it is the smallest positive number that is missing in the input array.
Problem approach
Create a hash set of numbers in the array.
Iterate over the array.
Check for missing elements in the hash set; otherwise, the missing number is nums.length + 1.
2. Find Minimum Number Of Coins
Easy
15m average time
85% success
0/40
Asked in companies
Given an infinite supply of Indian currency i.e. [1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, 1000] valued coins and an amount 'N'.
Find the minimum coins needed to make the sum equal to 'N'. You have to return the list containing the value of coins required in decreasing order.
For Example
For Amount = 70, the minimum number of coins required is 2 i.e an Rs. 50 coin and a Rs. 20 coin.
Note
It is always possible to find the minimum number of coins for the given amount. So, the answer will always exist.
Problem approach
Create a DP array initialized with an impossible value.
Set the base case: dp[0] = 0.
Try each coin and update the minimum number of coins.
Here's your problem of the day 
Solving this problem will increase your chance to get selected in this company
Skill covered: Programming
How do you remove whitespace from the start of a string?
Choose another skill to practice
Similar interview experiences
SDE - 1
4 rounds | 8 problems
Interviewed by Amazon
Selected 
8962 views
0 comments
0 upvotes
Fullstack Developer
2 rounds | 4 problems
Interviewed by Amazon
Rejected
7905 views
2 comments
0 upvotes
SDE - Intern
1 rounds | 3 problems
Interviewed by Amazon
Selected 3502 views
0 comments
0 upvotes
System Development Engineer
2 rounds | 2 problems
Interviewed by Amazon
Rejected
5140 views
1 comments
0 upvotes