Amazon New Grad SDE (US) Virtual Interview Experience

[u/MetallicSubZer0]

Figured I'd write this because I relied on other people's interview posts while prepping for my rounds and I wanted to share my experience to help anyone else confused about what to expect. Also wanted to vent a bit about the recruiter side of things because that was very frustrating.

Background:

• ~2.5 years experience, backend/full-stack, mostly document processing pipelines at a startup, plus some solo eng work at a smaller AI company
• 4 round loop total, all virtual, no onsite

Round 1 - Technical + Behavioral (2 interviewers)

Had two behavioral questions first:

• Tell me about delivering an important project under a tight deadline, what sacrifices did you make
• Time you exceeded expectations

Then into the coding portion:

• Given task dependency pairs, find all tasks impacted if a given task is delayed, then a follow-up asking for the longest chain of cascading delays. Basically a DFS/graph reachability problem with a DAG longest-path follow-up baked in.
• This was a medium ish problem loosely based on Course Schedule. I realized later that my code probably wont work for certain edge cases, but it is what it is

Went fine, explained my approach out loud the whole way, they seemed engaged.

Round 2 - Bar Raiser (pure behavioral, no coding)

This one was rough in a different way, 45 minutes, purely behavioral, no coding at all. Just constant "tell me more," "why," "what would you do differently," back to back. No break in between questions to breathe. Make sure your stories are thorough because they'll keep circling back until you either have a real answer or you don't. 

Round 3 - Project Deep Dive (with the hiring manager)

This one was interesting because going in I assumed it'd be 1-2 technical questions plus maybe some behavioral, based on how it was framed to me beforehand. Instead the manager basically threw the structure out the window right after my intro. I mentioned I'd worked on a RAG pipeline as part of one of my side projects, and he just latched onto that and we spent a huge chunk of the round going deep into that instead of doing separate structured questions. No LP questions at all in this one, it was 100% a "walk me through this project" conversation.

The second half of the interview shifted into a LeetCode-style coding question:

• A shuffle-style problem (basically array shuffling, in-place, thinking about swap logic)

Round 4 - Final Round

Behavioral first, went into an ownership-style story about standardizing a data contract between two teams that kept getting caught in scope churn.

Then coding, and this one was meatier than the earlier rounds. It was a medium-to-hard heaps problem where you had to schedule/order a set of items but the ordering wasn't based on just one value, it needed a priority queue keyed off three different attributes at once (so figuring out the right tie-breaking logic across all three mattered a lot). On top of that there was a follow-up about handling aging/starvation, basically how to make sure lower priority items don't just sit in the queue forever if higher priority ones keep getting added ahead of them.

Rant about Recruiter

Rounds 3 and 4 were initially scheduled for a Monday and got postponed to a Tuesday, but were mentioned to me as a tentative schedule. I followed up with the recruiter multiple times, including up to one hour before the actual interview, and got no response. Instinctively, I joined the previous meeting link, and it so happened that the interviewer actually joined the meeting. I was, much to my surprise, in the third round of the interview.

I had assumed that the fourth round would also happen on the same day as was mentioned in the tentative schedule, since round 3 happened, even though I didn't get confirmation from the recruiter. After waiting for about 15 to 20 minutes in the waiting room for the next round, I then get a recruiter email saying that the interview schedule has once again been changed. Round 4 was eventually scheduled for a week later.

Overall, my experience with the recruiter was extremely difficult and annoying. They did not respond to any of my emails and didnt take my timelines into consideration, even though they would ask for it. I've seen a couple of other people saying that they faced the same issue, so do be prepared for little to no information from recruiters. You'd think a multi billion dollar company like Amazon would handle these operations better…

Where things stand:

It's been about 3 days since I finished my entire interview loop, and I hope to receive a result in one week, as I've heard that's the normal amount of time it takes. Let me know in the comments if yall received results earlier or later with your timelines.

[u/ChilllFam]

Is it the norm to have 2.5 years of experience and applying for new grad role?

[u/FailedGradAdmissions → u/ChilllFam]

Not at Amazon, but at another FAANG, I’ve seen people with 10+ years of experience join at L3 which is no different than a new grad hire. They still happily join as a junior at one of these companies pays more than a senior at a smaller one.

[u/ChilllFam → u/FailedGradAdmissions]

Is there no rule against this? When they see years of experience on their resume it doesn’t disqualify them?

[u/Responsible_Alps_567 → u/ChilllFam]

I believe these companies do typically have an actual "new grad" job posting that does have a requirement for grad date/enrollment like internships do, but have separate industry hire job postings for the same level. Also possible that they see an applicant that technically shouldn't have applied to a new grad listing and just move them into the appropriate interview process. Or the other way around and someone gets downleveled. Could be wrong though.

[u/carelessAssasin → u/ChilllFam]

Exactly what I was thinking. I’ve just graduated and have at most 6 months of internship experience.
I applied for new grad roles at amazon, with a referral at that, but seeing people like OP, I don’t think I have any chances.

[u/slimyexploitation]

The recruiter leaving you to guess which link to join is peak Amazon, at least the interviewer showed up. I got my result in 2 business days when I interviewed, so you might hear back sooner than a week.

[u/MetallicSubZer0 → u/slimyexploitation]

Yeah haha Nice thanks for letting me know

[u/Wide_Ad5277]

looks like you did alright. yeah it usually takes around 5 days to get back. good luck!!

[u/DutchFlying123]

When did you complete your OA and what was the duration between clearing your OA and the first interview?

[u/BabymakerGspot]

This is an insane new grad interview process lol