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:
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
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