This is the fourth article of our guide to preparing for a Software Development Engineer (SDE) interview with Amazon.
- Prepare for Amazon behavioral interview questions
- 9 Amazon behavioral interview tips
- 10+ Amazon coding interview tips
- Amazon coding interview questions
A quick search on Google for “Amazon coding interview questions” yields a whole lot of results in different flavors.
Let’s get one thing straight: Interviewers at Amazon are free to ask ANY questions they want. This implies that there is NO exhaustive list that can cover every conceivable coding question.
Remember, Amazon’s interview goal is to assess one’s ability to problem solve and to work as an Amazonian. A candidate wouldn’t do himself/herself or Amazon a favor by learning solutions to coding questions by heart.
Save yourself some bucks
I have seen very respectful websites proposing to divulge specific interview questions for an Amazon interview if you pay a little extra.
Don’t fall for it. You are better off buying a copy of Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell to practice a range of questions (data structures, system design, behavioral questions, etc.) and brush-up various technical concepts.
Trends
Interviewers tend to ask the same questions. As an interviewer, this helps to build a baseline to evaluate candidates. So that you can compare a candidate to others.
So yes, some questions may be asked more frequently than others, but there is no way to know this upfront. I personally have a pool of ~20 coding questions I ask frequently.
Beat the odds
At best you have a list of interviewers provided before your onsite by a recruiter (never happened to me but I have seen it) and you google each interviewer to find out what they blog about and what their interests are.
How do you get prepared for an interview at Amazon
I should probably create a separate blog post for this. But the short answer is to practice solving coding questions (LeetCode, etc.) and read-up on your basics.
Make sure you understand all the concepts from Cracking the Coding Interview. Make sure you can solve all easy, medium and most hard questions.
Practice makes perfect
Practice solving coding questions as much as possible. Make sure to also prepare for the behavioral questions and read our tips for a successful coding interview.
If you want a dry run, go to Mocki.co and request a mock interview led by some of our Software Engineers.
You can also use Pramp.com. But it may end up being a waste of your time as there is no guarantee who your “interviewer” will be. How long he has been in the industry for and where he currently works.
Good luck!
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