Amazon SDE-1 from a Tier-3 college — applying broadly paid off

Background

I'm from a Tier-3 college, so to maximise my chances I applied to several different SDE-1 openings through Amazon's careers portal rather than pinning everything on one application.

Online assessment

Four sections: DSA, a work-style assessment (responding to sample workplace emails), a behavioural section, and Leadership Principles questions. The non-DSA sections were where a lot of technically strong candidates seemed to stumble.

Round-by-round

Round 1

Conducted by two SDEs together: two DSA problems — one binary search, one combining DP and graphs — plus behavioural and Leadership Principles questions. I made a conscious effort to stay calm where I got stuck rather than letting it derail the round.

Round 2

With an SDE-2, starting with a deep dive into past work and projects. Then a hard DSA problem followed by a medium topological sort question, with Leadership Principles throughout.

Round 3

With a senior lead, almost entirely behavioural and Leadership Principles. The technical portion can apparently be skipped at this stage if earlier rounds went well, which seemed to be the case.

Verdict

Selected.