Round 1
Questions:
- Two different Leadership Principles (LP) questions were asked, answered using the STAR format.
- Designed a search API function to search for files in a specific directory and sort them alphabetically, by size, etc.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate felt they provided good answers to the LP questions and wrote a decent amount of code for the API function. They spent considerable time discussing edge cases and user design considerations.
Interviewer's Feedback
The hiring manager seemed happy with the candidate's answers and expressed enthusiasm about discussing their role further if the candidate joined Amazon.
Round 2
Questions:
- Leadership Principles (LP) questions were discussed.
- Problem: A robot starts at (0, 0) of a matrix. Given a list of items to collect and O(1) helper functions that return the coordinates of each item, find the most efficient path for the robot to collect all items.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate recognized the problem as a variant of the NP-Hard traveling salesman problem. They initially suggested a backtracking brute force approach to try all possible paths. Eventually, they implemented an O(n!) permutations backtracking solution as suggested by the interviewer.
Interviewer's Feedback
The interviewer seemed to want a more efficient solution than the brute force approach that the candidate implemented.
Round 3
Questions:
- Leadership Principles (LP) questions were discussed.
- Solved a medium-level tree problem with an O(n) recursive solution.
Candidate's Approach
The candidate successfully solved the tree problem and traced through a dry run with the interviewer, who was happy with the solution.
Interviewer's Feedback
The SDE 2 interviewer had a good rapport with the candidate and seemed pleased with the candidate's performance during this round.