I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2025
Interview
Timeline:
Online Assessment: January 2025
Loop Interviews: April 2025
Round 1 – Technical + Behavioral (SDE-2)
Duration: 1 hour
0.5 hr Behavioral: Focus on Amazon Leadership Principles. Asked about ownership, bias for action, and delivering results.
0.5 hr Technical: Unbounded Knapsack problem – minimize box combinations to reach a target.
-I explained the brute-force recursive approach, then optimized using top-down DP with memoization.
Follow-up: Asked to modify the solution for Bounded Knapsack (each box can be used only certain no of times).
Round 2 – Managerial Round
Duration: 1 hour
Experience: Disorganized and unclear.
-Interviewer was confused, used a personal laptop, and struggled with tech setup (mic/camera on/off).
-No question was shared via the code editor.
-Verbally described a vague Elevator System Design OOP problem and kept adding unrelated helper methods.
-Frequent interruptions, poor structure, and lack of clarity.
Feedback: Amazon should evaluate interviewers based on their ability to conduct structured, effective interviews—not solely on seniority.
Round 3 – Technical + Behavioral (SDE-2)
Duration: 1 hour
0.5 hr Behavioral:
Question 1: Delivered a critical project under a tight deadline. Asked to elaborate on trade-offs and sacrifices made.
Question 2: Made a long-term decision sacrificing short-term gain. Asked to explain the rationale and business impact.
0.5 hr Technical:
Simulated Unix find command functionality.
1: Search and return all files over a certain size ( 5MB) in a directory tree.
2: Search and return all .xml files in a directory.
-Implemented recursive DFS traversal with filtering logic.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical rounds were structured and focused with clear problem statements. However, the managerial round was disorganized and poorly executed—Amazon should ensure senior-level interviewers are prepared and not improvising mid-interview.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.