The interview had a mix of DSA, project discussion, and behavioral questions based on Amazon Leadership Principles.

DSA: I was given a grid-based problem involving a forest where different cells contained trees of different heights. The objective was to start from the top-left cell and remove all the trees in increasing order of their heights, while moving only up, down, left, or right through walkable cells.

A cell containing 0 was blocked, while positive values represented walkable cells. After cutting a tree, that cell became an empty walkable cell. The task was to find the minimum number of moves required to remove every tree, or return -1 if some tree could not be reached.

The interviewer first asked me to explain the approach and then write the code.

I initially considered whether a single BFS could be used to traverse the entire grid and handle all the trees together. During the discussion, I realized that this would not correctly capture the requirement of visiting the trees in their specified height order.

Approach: Sort the trees by height and run BFS between consecutive trees to find the shortest path. Add each BFS distance to the answer; if any tree is unreachable, return -1.

There was also a project discussion followed by Leadership Principle–based behavioral questions, with most questions revolving around my project and my actual experiences.

Some questions were:

1. What was the most challenging part of your project, and how did you solve it?
2. Tell me about a time when you had to meet a tight deadline.
3. Tell me about a time when you received critical feedback. What did you do with it?
4. What is one interesting aspect of your project that we haven't discussed yet but you would like to talk about?