I applied for the Amazon SDE Internship (Veterans program). The process consisted of multiple rounds:
Technical Coding Round – Focused on data structures and algorithms. You’re expected to explain your thinking clearly while coding. Communication matters just as much as correctness.
Behavioral / Leadership Principles Round – Heavy emphasis on STAR format answers. They go deep into ownership, dealing with ambiguity, failure, and conflict.
Final Combo Round – Mixed technical + behavioral. This round felt like a bar-raiser evaluation. They assess not only problem-solving ability but also long-term growth potential, resilience, and clarity of thought.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked me to solve a data structures and algorithms problem involving efficient lookups and edge case handling. The focus wasn’t just on getting the correct answer — they wanted me to explain my reasoning clearly, analyze time and space complexity, and discuss trade-offs between different approaches.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.