Amazon SDE Intern Interview Experience (2 Technical Rounds) – Need Honest Opinion on Chances
Just finished my Amazon SDE Intern interviews (2 rounds) and honestly not sure how to feel about my chances.
Background:
- ~1500+ DSA problems solved
- LC peak around 1900
- Strong focus on backend + GenAI projects
Round 1:
Started with introduction and then interviewer went deep into my GenAI project (RAG, validation, why not just use ChatGPT directly, handling generic outputs, etc.).
Then 2 DSA questions:
Gas station type greedy problem
Boats to save people (2 pointers/greedy)
He grilled me on optimizations and simplifications but overall discussion was collaborative. Then one LP question around conflict in a team.
Round 2:
Again started with intro + project discussion. Interviewer asked about how I debug AI outputs and validate Gemini responses.
Then 2 DSA questions:
We had prices array + M coupons. Each coupon could reduce a value by dividing by powers of 2. Needed to minimize total cost.
I first explored some non-optimal ideas, then derived greedy + max heap approach (always reduce current maximum). Interviewer heavily grilled complexity and reasoning.
DP-style question where if we take value x, we cannot take adjacent values (x-1 and x+1).
I derived the frequency/value accumulation transformation myself and explained recursion + memoization/DP approach. Interviewer asked me to manually explain the recurrence on a testcase instead of directly writing DP.
Overall both interviews were pretty probing. I wasn’t spoon-fed hints but interviewers did challenge almost every assumption and asked “why” repeatedly.
I did solve/discuss all questions, but definitely not in a perfectly smooth way. There were some corrections and optimizations during discussion.
What do you guys think realistically? Competitive enough for selection or too inconsistent?