Amazon SDE 1 Interview Experience

Round 1: Technical Round with Two SDE 2s

Questions:

• Leadership Questions:
  We started with a discussion on leadership principles where I shared my experiences and problem-solving approach.

• Technical Questions:

  1. Problem 1:
     Given a vector of strings representing Spotify songs, I was tasked to sort the array such that:
     • The most listened song appears first.
     • In case of a tie, the most recently played song should be placed at the front.
     • Initially used inbuilt sort function but I was asked to write the implementation of sort function also.
  2. Problem 2:
     Write an inorder traversal of a binary tree using recursion.
     • Follow-up: Implement the same traversal using a stack.

Candidate's Approach

No approach provided.

Interviewer's Feedback

No feedback provided.

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Round 2: Another Technical Round with Two SDE 2s

Questions:

• Problem 1:
  Return the number of pairs in an array such that the difference between two numbers is divisible by k.

• Problem 2:
  Design a data structure to support the following operations efficiently:

  1. Insertion of a new element.
  2. Removal of an existing element.
  3. GetRandom function to retrieve a random element with equal probability.
  • Language: C++ implementation of getRandom(int[]).
  • Follow-up: We discussed optimizations and trade-offs for the approach I used.

Candidate's Approach

No approach provided.

Interviewer's Feedback

No feedback provided.

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Round 3: Leadership and Resume Grilling

Questions:

• A senior manager with 20+ years of experience conducted this round.
• Focus Areas:
  1. Deep dive into 4 leadership principles where I was asked to share real-life examples.
  2. Intense questioning on my resume, including challenges faced and how I solved them.

Candidate's Approach

No approach provided.

Interviewer's Feedback

No feedback provided.

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Verdict: Selected 🎉

I received a call from HR just 2 days later with the good news! 😊

This was a challenging yet rewarding experience, and I’m thrilled to join such a dynamic organization. A big thank you to my interviewers and everyone who supported me along the way! 🙏