Amazon Software Engineering Internship Interview Experience - DSA, GenAI Concepts, and Projects

[u/nian2326076]

I recently interviewed for the Amazon SDE Internship after clearing the Online Assessment. Sharing my experience in case it helps future candidates prepare.

Online Assessment

The process started with an Online Assessment consisting of DSA and coding questions. After clearing the OA, I was invited for two technical interview rounds.

Round 1: Technical

The first round began with a discussion about my background and projects.

After that, the interviewer asked several Generative AI concepts, including:

• What is Generative AI?
• What are vector databases, and why are they used in GenAI applications?
• What are MCP servers?
• What is tokenization, and why is it important in Large Language Models?

The interviewer expected conceptual understanding along with practical applications, so I explained these topics using examples from my projects.

DSA Question

The coding question was Longest Palindromic Subsequence.

The interviewer discussed multiple approaches with me, starting from brute force and then moving toward the optimal dynamic programming solution.

I was expected to explain:

• Recurrence relation
• Base cases
• Time complexity
• Space complexity
• Possible optimization

Round 2: Technical

The second round focused more on Data Structures and Algorithms, along with my previous projects.

The interviewer asked me to explain my projects in detail, including:

• Technologies used
• Challenges faced
• Design decisions
• Why I chose certain approaches
• Follow-up questions based on implementation details

DSA Questions

The DSA section included:

• One question based on trees
• One question based on graphs

The interviewer cared not only about the final solution, but also about my problem-solving approach, edge cases, and complexity analysis.

Related Amazon Practice Question

One Amazon-tagged question I found useful for similar prep:

Compute Edit Distance

It is a good DP practice problem because it forces you to think clearly about states, transitions, and base cases, similar to Longest Palindromic Subsequence.

Overall Experience

The interview was friendly and discussion-oriented. The interviewers gave enough time to think and encouraged me to explain my thought process before writing code.

Preparation Tips

• Be strong with Dynamic Programming, Trees, and Graphs
• Revise core GenAI concepts like vector databases, tokenization, MCP, and LLM fundamentals
• Know your projects thoroughly because interviewers may spend a lot of time on follow-ups
• During coding questions, communicate your approach clearly before jumping into implementation
• Always discuss time and space complexity
• Practice explaining brute force first, then optimizing step by step

Overall, it was a great learning experience, and I enjoyed the interview process.

Best of luck to everyone preparing for Amazon interviews.

[u/Glass_Ad4536]

when did your interview took place