Amazon Onsite Ad Team

Amazon On-site Seattle AD Team SDE I

Interviewee is a new graduate, Master’s Degree in Computer Science.
Location: on-site Seattle
Team: Amazon AD
Position: SDE1

There are four rounds in total from 9.30am to 12.45pm. The schedule is pretty intense as there was only one 10 minutes break. The third round was a big challenge for me.

1st Round

by interviewer and a shadow
Question : spiral print matrix.
Follow-up Question: How to change the spiral counter clockwise.
Follow-up Question : In the sense of Object Oriented Design, how to reduce repetitive codes and improve scalability.

2nd Round

by interviewer and a shadow
Question The classic one - parking lot design.

3rd Round

by interviewer with 10+ years work experience at Amazon
Question: Design this interactive feature for an online player - a small fortune bag on the web page next to the online player. Every user can click on the bag to fill it up a bit. When the bag is completely filled, it will ‘explode’. Then the bag will get empty and ready to be refilled.

I was totally lost at this problem since it is never seen in anywhere and I did not have work experience before. This question given by a 10 years experiencer is definitely bar raiser. I spoke as much as I could think of on the matter and left everything else to luck.

4th Round

by manager level interviewer
Question: Implement a stack bug-free.
I went with the linked list and asked if he wants the stack data to be generic or integer. He said let’s start with integer and later asked me to upgrade it to generic.
Follow-up Question: Assume that strings are stored in the stack that I implemented in the previous question, how to find the longest string in the stack.
My way was to poll everything from the stack and count the length of the strings.
He smiled and asked :’ what if the other teams need the stack later?’
I said:’ we can put the strings into a buffer and put them back into the stack after checking the length’.
He smiled again… I realized that he wanted optimization in space. So I said that I could build an API in the stack class to scan through every node. He seemed happy with the answer.

HR said to get back to me on Friday the same week. On Friday she called with an offer.




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