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Pitch: I delivered my opening introduction structured around Amazon’s 16 Leadership Principles, framing my background and project highlights directly through that lens.
Question 1: Data Structures & Algorithms (Greedy / String Manipulation)
Problem Type: Story-based DSA problem (took ~5–7 minutes to parse the actual core requirement).
Problem Statement:
You are given two parentheses strings, A and B, along with an array C of the same length as B, where C[i] represents the cost/value associated with taking the character at index i in string B.
You need to make string A balanced by borrowing/transferring parentheses from string B. Moving a character from B to any position in A incurs/awards the specified cost in C.
Goal: Balance string A using characters from B while maximizing the total cost/value gained.
Question 2: System Design & Algorithms (External Sorting at Scale)
Problem Statement:
"You have 64 TB of already sorted data and 1 TB of unsorted data. How do you combine them to produce 65 TB of completely sorted data efficiently?"
I stucked here a bit but reached to merge sort with discussion (discussing while understanding is really important, you need not to know the answer at first but explaining your thoughts and reaching to the correctness is really important)
Focus: Deep dive into my inter-IIIT hackathon project (a decentralized/blockchain-based application).
Execution: Walked through the architecture, technical trade-offs, state management, and real-world utility. Handled all follow-ups confidently without breaking flow.
No dedicated behavioral questions were asked in this round, so I utilized the Q&A segment to engage the interviewer on Amazon’s culture:
Asked about their personal day-to-day experience engineering at Amazon.
Explored which specific Leadership Principles their team leans on to ship frugal, high-scale, and customer-centric products rapidly.
In second round when I started introducing myself he was like let me read the resume for a bit and started Opening my GitHub and project to see if it was genuine and deployed from my GitHub or not, is it just fresh made or actually genuinely made, checking commits and all,
It started with one usecase of AI question and gen ai models and at what extent we can use it personally and professionally.
As being a student of Economics (minor), and I also watch a lot of yt videos I told him all the aspect from ethical aspect (EU directed to claude), to till what extent, personal, professional, tradeoff between time saved and money spend in ai credits (trading examples), what could go wrong and mess things up, how human can work as a orchestrator to maximise output and all, i framed it so well he was really really impressed 😁
then started dsa round 1 dsa question, what is the maximum length of a string containing same characters (characters were alphabets of same type all big or all small), you can switch k characters to any characters you want
I didn't get the question first because he framed it differently, but then I got it, I took two minutes time from him then explained him brute force with dry run (time complexity and space ) then optimal + dry run (time and space complexity), I made him satisfied so that he can feel the orgasm.
Then he asked me to code rate limiter, (not gonna lie I have not studied lld or hld but I was calm i tried to think of the way that it actually works and i literally coded it in one go in cpp in most optimal way without knowing the solution
Unordered map < string, unordered map < int, string>> (user id , numberth of iteration and time stamp)
He was really impressed,
Then he grilled me on my resume, my projects my work experience, hackathons, position of responsibility, i answered them alll very well,
Again I asked the same exiting question I asked in last round, and that sums up all.
Tips: The verdict is I got selected, (9/40) was the selection ratio among selected for the interview, the interview was on campus in person, just be best amazonian (the principles), use I instead we, try to discuss during the interviews, tell him what you are understanding and try to extract information from interviewer (he is going to love it), R1 was by Sde 2 and R2 was by Sde 3, 1-1.25 hrs each, don't show that you know everything or be overconfident, but be confident and calm and try to build up interaction, make him happy and he will do the same.
Participating in hackathon really helped building leadership and I was also mentoring student and it helped me communicate properly, that really helped me explain my thoughts crisp and concise without losing the quality of thought. Just try to reach to the final answer even you don't know it in the beginning.
I felt really satisfied after giving the interview and was mostly sure that I got it, maybe that was just a lucky day ( gave 20+ OAs before 😅)
All the best all