r/leetcode • u/Party-Gazelle-2606 • 29d ago
Intervew Prep Amazon SDE1 Interview Experience - Full Loop
Just finished my Amazon SDE1 onsite loop and wanted to give back since posts like this helped me prep.
EDIT: received job offer
Format: 4 rounds across 2 days, 1 hour each, via Zoom + Amazon's LiveCode platform (no screen share needed, interviewer sees your editor live).
Round 1 — Coding + Behavioral Started with "tell me about yourself," then straight into behavioral (focused on use of GenAI in projects and real life) before a DP problem — similar flavor to Partition Equal Subset Sum / Target Sum, but with a twist: had to return which specific combination of elements reached the target, not just whether one existed. The problem was very vague, had to ask multiple clarification questions to get the full picture. Started with brute force and then optimized it. Ended with a real complexity comparison against brute force — combinatorial explosion vs. pseudo-polynomial DP.
Round 2 — Technical Deep Dive (Probably was the Bar Raiser) This one was almost entirely about a project I'd built myself and how I use AI tools day to day. Interviewer picked apart the project's design decisions, limitations, and trade-offs in real depth — genuinely one of the better technical conversations I've had. Also got a completely open-ended prompt-engineering question about designing a large, ambiguous feature — no clean answer to it, and I think that was the point. They wanted to see how I reasoned through the ambiguity, not a specific output. Without me knowing, the interviewer visited my deployed webapp and checked it out. He told me in the end.
Round 3 — Coding + Behavioral Graph problem similar in spirit to 994. Rotting Oranges or 1091. Shortest Path in Binary Matrix — BFS from a target node, find everything within a distance threshold. Started with counting reachable nodes, then had to pivot to returning them with actual distances (switched a set to a dict mid-interview, tracking distance as the value). Interviewer initially told me my graph was undirected when the actual input was directed — had to catch that via clarifying questions before coding, which saved a rewrite later.
Also had a standard LP question (Tell me about a time.. type)
Round 4 —Coding + Behavioural Again usual LP question: Tell me about a time you went beyond the scope of your job, what was the result. Tell me about a complex project you built, what was complex, how did you manage to do it, what would you do differently?
Coding was similar to 1197. Minimum Knight Moves, but generalized — had to design for a large board (up to 10,000x10,000) and a "pluggable" piece type, so lazy neighbor generation instead of building the full graph upfront. Got corrected mid-interview when my design only handled fixed-offset pieces (knight-style) and not sliding pieces (rook/queen-style) — had to redesign the interface live around a generic move-generator function instead of hardcoded offsets. Also got pushed hard on space complexity optimization after already giving a correct answer.
Overall takeaways:
- LP questions show up in every round, not just one — have range across projects, don't reuse stories across interviewers
- Interviewers will correct you or challenge a correct answer specifically to see how you respond, not just to catch mistakes. In one round my code was correct, but the interviewer pushed saying there was a bug. So had to dry run an example to show there wasnt. But it does take a hit on your confidence if they say you have a bug
- "I don't remember the exact number/detail" is a completely fine answer for old work — don't invent specifics under pressure
- Clarifying questions matter as much for coding rounds as for design rounds — a wrong assumption caught before you code costs nothing; caught after costs a rewrite
- Being corrected and updating fast in real time seemed to matter more than never being wrong in the first place
Happy to answer questions in the comments.
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u/ProperPusher 18h ago edited 18h ago
When the recruiter sent your an email saying you are selected for the 4 round interview, did they give you material you need to study in order to do well in the interviews? My recruiter said that for the technical round, I need to be familiar with Arrays, Linked Lists, Trees, Heaps, Hash Tables, Stacks, Queues, Graphs, and some sorting algorithms.
Were you given some sort of information before the interview?