Amazon Interview Experience

Overall it was a great experience for me!!

I cracked Amazon screening round twice. The first one was held at around June 25, two coding problems were there, one of them was to find a largest connected component in a matrix of 0’s and 1’s and other one was to find out the number of trailing zeroes in a factorial of a number. I managed to solve both of the problems and got an interview letter but sadly I was in my village and because of no network I couldn’t check my email, when I got to know I was called for an interview, it was too late.

Might be based on the first round of performance I was sent another link exactly 20 days later. It had two coding problems along with some apti’s, I don’t remember the coding question exactly, but one of them was required to find a shortest path, another one was a ad-HOC problem.

This time I was called to their Bangalore office to attend the onsite interviews.

Onsite interview had around 4 rounds of interview,

1. This was a algorithmic Interview consisted of two coding problems, I managed to get the solution for both of them. Interviewers were really nice and approachable, they kept on discussing the different ways to solve the problems and optimizing them.
2. Second one was a system design Interview. I was asked to design the data structures for Zomato cuisines adding and removing system, different ways of designing approaches were discussed.
3. This round had 2 coding problems, problems were quite hard. First one was a DP based problem I struggled in solving this question but after giving some thought I managed to come up with a solution. Second question was to copy a LinkedList which has random pointers along with the next pointer to form another LinkedList and you are not supposed to use any extra spaces except for nodes. This was probably hard question I have ever faced, after giving some thoughts I managed to solve this problem.
4. This was a bar raiser round. And to be honest I didn’t know there is a round called bar raiser. This was taken by one of the senior employee of Amazon. I didn’t do well in this round, questions were more centric towards behavioral rather than technical.

And after this I was asked to leave and result will be communicated later. After 3 weeks I got a mail from HR saying that they have decided not to go further with my application.

Things I learned from this interview,

1. Ask as many as questions possible, untill you get the clarity over the questions asked, don’t go for coding.
2. Be informed that bar raiser is one of the interview which can easily drag your natural tendency. Be confident and be firm in your decision.
3. Always it’s not just about technical, you should always prove that you are a good candidate in-terms of attitude, team coordination etc.
4. Try to write the code as clean as possible, use appropriate variable names, syntaxes. Always go with approach first and code.
5. And last but not least never easily give up.