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.**