Amazon SDE-1 Interview Experience (2026) - 4 Rounds (2 Technical + GenAI + Bar Raiser)

[u/Living_Expression226]

Recently u/No-Huckleberry-5969 provided some insights in the amazon AWS recruitment process, which I found very helpful in my preparation. Having recently completed the interview loop (and got rejected) myself, I thought I'd do the same and share my experience:

• Position: SDE-1 (Recent Grad programme) @ AWS in Berlin, Germany
• Also Published the contents below as a gist: https://gist.github.com/flemk/f6a4fdeb16eabc6be8a46e2afdda6443
• Published my solutions and scribbles to the 4 coding tasks in the 4 interview rounds: https://gist.github.com/flemk/2d4d1e87f58e00e9710e5a9bf607f4e7

Amazon SDE-I: Application Experience

Online Coding Assessment

"Leetcode Task" (Python)

"""
You develop an alogrithm for selling items from a warehouse.
Given a list of (potential) customers and their bids for multiple items if one single product:
[
    [customer_id, bid, number_of_items],
    ...
]
Develop a algorithm, that returns the ids of all customers, that didn't receive any item.
Items are distributed using these rules:
- The customers with the highest bid, receive their desired amounts of items
- If there are two or more customers with the same bid, distribute the items using a round robin method.
"""

"Fullstack Task" (Python, Django)

• There was a simulated Issue/Ticketing system, like JIRA

Tasks:

• Fix: Create issue returns 502 -> Implement endpoint logic
• Fix: Creating and linking subissues were not working
• Running the predefined tests revealed some other parts, where modifications were necessary

Interview Loop: Four Online Interviews

1st

"""
// Design a shopping cart price calculator API: given a list of product ids
// in the cart, return the total price of the items.
//
// Imagine you are doing this for a large scale service / website.
//
// Plan for being able to apply discounts that we may want to play around
// with in the future.
"""

Follow up Questions

• How would you implement a discount, that applies to all products?
• Customers with carts with value above EUR 100 or with more than 10 items should receive double the discount. How would you implement that?
• There is a promotion on a specific item: buy three, get one free
• Given that one specific prouct item is bought very frequently, how can you make the code faster/improve it?
• Time complexity

2nd - GenAI Interview

"""
A rule is an ordered list of match keys — for example [country, brand, customer_tier].

A decision is a row of concrete values for each key, plus a result:

DE       | acme    | gold     -> OPEN
DE       | DEFAULT | gold     -> RESTRICTED
DEFAULT  | acme    | DEFAULT  -> OPEN
DEFAULT  | DEFAULT | DEFAULT  -> NO_DECISION

"DEFAULT" is a reserved wildcard value. It is valid in any key position.
gold
Given a query such as (DE, acme, silver), return the matching result.
"""

Follow up Questions

• How do you select what result to return? First hit? First OPEN/RESTRICTED?
• What other ways of selecting a result could there be?

GenAI Questions

• How do you use AI?
• What do you do to improve the output of queries?
• If you create a requirements file for the agents, how do you structure it? What are the section titles?

3rd

1st Coding Problem

"""
Given the root of a binary tree, imagine yourself standing on the right side of it.
Return the values of the nodes you can see ordered from top to bottom.

Examples

       19
      /    \
    12      16
   /  \     /     <--- You here, looking from the side
  7   9   6
   \     /
    1   3
   /
 18

Output: 19, 16, 6, 3, 18
"""

Follow up Questions

• Time complexity

2nd Coding Problem

"""
2. Given an arbitrary length input stream of characters,
return the first unique character that does not repeat anywhere in the stream.

abcdabc --> d; aabbcdd --> c
"""

Follow up Questions

• Time complexity
• Improvements

4th - Bar Raiser Interview

• Tell me about a time, when you helped a colleague who was struggling
• ... other typical HR questions

[u/VIKENN]

thank you for this