Amazon SDE 6-Month Intern Experience | HackOn 2024

Round 1: Online Assessment

• Duration: 70 mins
• Platform: HackerRank
• Questions: 2 LeetCode Mediums. One based on Hashmaps (similar to grouping anagrams) and another strictly on 1D Dynamic Programming.

Round 2: Technical Interview (Amazon Chime)

• Duration: 70 mins
• Interviewer: One SDE-2 and one SDE-1 shadowing the interview.
• Question 1: DP on Trees - Find the maximum sum of nodes such that no two adjacent nodes are included (similar to House Robber III).
• How to Answer: Start with the brute-force recursive tree, point out the overlapping subproblems, and then introduce memoization. I spent 10 minutes dry-running a large, complex test case to prove my base cases worked.
• Question 2 (Rapid Fire): The SDE-1 asked language implementation details: 'Difference between ordered/unordered map?', 'How is push_back implemented internally?', 'BFS vs DFS memory footprint?'
• Interviewer behavior: Extremely friendly. When I fumbled the C++ vector 'push_back' internal dynamic array resizing logic, they guided me to the answer gently.

Key Takeaways for Freshers

Amazon highly values their Leadership Principles (LPs) even for interns. Always be honest if you don't know an internal language mechanic. Admitting 'I don't know this, but here is my educated guess based on data structures' is much better than bluffing.