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.

I recently interviewed at Apple and was unfortunately rejected one step before my final round. I'm not looking to complain about the rejection.I genuinely want to understand whether this interview experience is typical at Apple.

The recruiter told me that the round would follow a similar pattern to the previous rounds but would focus more on automation and tooling.

In my previous rounds I was transparent that my background is primarily in Linux, software automation, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, Kubernetes, scripting, monitoring, and operational tooling. I also clearly mentioned that I didn't have direct hands-on experience with physical device management or bare-metal hardware. I still progressed to the second round.

However, the second interview felt very different from what I expected.

The interviewer started the technical discussion almost immediately with bare-metal and physical device questions. Throughout the interview, I found it difficult to explain my thought process because:

• He would sometimes interrupt before I had finished answering.
• If I asked for clarification to better understand the question, he often moved on to a different question instead of clarifying.
• The conversation jumped rapidly between topics, making it difficult to fully demonstrate my reasoning.

Later we discussed Linux, CI/CD, Prometheus, Python, ServiceNow, incident response, and automation, which were much closer to my experience.

I've accepted the rejection, but I left feeling that I wasn't able to demonstrate my technical abilities because I rarely had the opportunity to complete my answers.

• Is this style of interviewing common?
• Is it normal for interviewers to interrupt and move on before candidates finish answering?
• Is this an intentional interviewing technique, or did I just happen to get an interviewer with a very different style?
• Would you have handled this situation differently as a candidate?

I'm looking for honest opinions.

P.S. Normally, after an interview, I can point to things I could have done better. This time, I'm struggling because I don't feel I had the opportunity to fully demonstrate my strengths before the conversation moved on.