AMAZONInterview Experience — SDE

The process started with a PPT session conducted by the Amazon team from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM. After that, we had to move to our respective venues for the test. The OA was scheduled at 9:00 PM. The test duration was 2 hours and consisted of two rounds on the HackerRank platform. The first half of the OA was the coding round, which consisted of two problems. The first problem was based on the sliding window/two pointers. Problem: Given an integer array nums and an integer k, return the number of good subarrays of nums. A good array is an array where the number of distinct integers is exactly k. For example, [1,2,3,1,2] has 3 distinct integers: 1, 2, and 3. A subarray is a contiguous part of an array. Sample 1 nums = [1,2,1,2,3], k = 2 Output: 7 Sample 2 nums = [1,2,1,3,4], k = 3 Output: 3 The second question was the standard Largest Bitonic Subsequence problem. Problem: Given an array of positive integers, find the maximum length of a Bitonic subsequence. A subsequence of an array is called Bitonic if it is first strictly increasing and then strictly decreasing. Note: A strictly increasing or strictly decreasing sequence should not be considered a Bitonic sequence. Example 1 Input: n = 5, nums[] = [1, 2, 5, 3, 2] Output: 5 Example 2 Input: n = 8, nums[] = [1, 11, 2, 10, 4, 5, 2, 1] Output: 6 Example 3 Input: n = 3, nums[] = [10, 20, 30] Output: 0 Example 4 Input: n = 3, nums[] = [10, 10, 10] Output: 0 The coding round was fairly easy, and pretty much everyone was able to solve it. The second round was the Culture Fit Round, which lasted for one hour. I had a discussion with one of my seniors at Amazon, and he told me that this is the most important round because the coding questions tend to be easy. He advised me to take my time and read every question carefully, as many people rush through these questions and miss out on getting shortlisted. The first exercise consisted of statements where you had to choose whether you agree, disagree, or fall somewhere in between. However, it is generally recommended to avoid staying in the middle and instead lean toward one side. The second part involved choosing the most appropriate reply to emails that you received in different workplace scenarios. The third part was a personality assessment with questions like "Would you rather do this or that?" along with agree/disagree-type options. Again, it is generally recommended to be decisive in your responses. One important thing to note is that they tend to repeat similar questions throughout the assessment to check whether your answers remain consistent. Therefore, utmost care should be taken to avoid contradicting yourself. The very next day, the shortlist was released, and my name was on it. I immediately started revising Linked List concepts. The interview was conducted on Amazon Chime and had two panelists. There was only a single interview round, and the expected hiring number was around 20 candidates, so the chances looked good (at least from what I anticipated). The interview started with two LeetCode questions. The first one was: https://leetcode.com/problems/search-a-2d-matrix/description/ The process was the usual one: speaking out my thoughts, discussing the brute-force approach of O(n × m), then optimizing it to row-wise binary search O(n log m), and finally reaching the fully optimized solution of O(log(n × m)). This is a standard Striver Sheet problem. The second question was: https://leetcode.com/problems/symmetric-tree/description/