Amazon SDE Intern Interview Experience — One Round to Decide Everything

Amazon has started sending out OA invitations again recently. Over the past few weeks I helped several friends go through the process — and everything remains much the same as last year: OA format unchanged, interview setup consistent, and question types stable.

Although the old idea of“Amazon internship as a guaranteed fallback”isn’t really valid anymore, I still believe Amazon internships remain one of the highest-value opportunities for students — for two very practical reasons.

✅ Interview is simple and straightforward

The entire interview process is just one round:

• ~20 minutes of behavioral questions (BQ)

Because it’s quick and not overly difficult, it’s ideal for students trying to land their first“big tech”internship.

✅ Return offer rate is still good

If you successfully land the internship, getting a return offer is still quite possible. The classic path many people follow remains valid:
One-round interview → Internship → Return offer → Chill final school year → Full-time job after graduation

Because of this, I’m sharing a recent interview summary I collected early this year — for everyone who is preparing.

🧩 Behavioral Questions (~20 min)

The BQ section follows Amazon’s typical flavor — questions inspired by Amazon’s Leadership Principles, slightly modified:

1. Talk about your most successful project.
   • Interviewers often follow up: How do you define“success”? What do you value more — outcome or process? Which personal qualities do you consider crucial for an engineer?
2. Describe the most meaningful feedback or criticism you ever received.
   • What was the feedback? How did you process and respond to it? Reflecting maturity and ability to learn from mistakes is a plus.
3. Give an example where you committed to a group decision even though you disagreed initially.
   • Interviewers want to see whether you can balance team needs vs. personal opinions, and how you handle that gracefully.

Past Amazon Coding Questions (Random 5)

Below are five real Amazon interview problems selected randomly from past question banks. These examples reflect the typical difficulty and style of SDE Intern interviews.

1. Implement pow(x, n)

Description:
Implement the function pow(x, n) without using any built-in power functions.

Examples:

• Input: x = 2, n = 5 → Output: 32
• Input: x = 3.4, n = 3 → Output: 39.04

Typical Approach:
Binary exponentiation (fast power).

2. Find Compound Words

You are given a large list of English words. Some words are“compound words”, meaning they can be fully constructed by combining two or more words from the same list.

Example Input:
[rockstar, rock, star, rocks, tar, superhighway, super, highway, high, way]

Example Output:

[rock, star]
[super, highway]
[super, high, way]

Typical Approach:
Dynamic programming / word-break-style solution.

3. Most Frequent 3-Page Web Navigation Pattern

Each log entry contains:
session_id, web_page_id

Your task is to determine the most frequently visited sequence of three consecutive pages across all sessions.

Example:
If the pattern <cart → checkout → help> appears twice, it should be returned as the most frequent sequence.

Typical Approach:

• Build page sequences per session
• Use a sliding window to extract 3-page patterns
• Count frequencies using a hash map

4. Sort a K-Misplaced Array

You are given an array that is“almost sorted”:
each element is at most k positions away from its correct sorted position.

Example:
Input: [3, 1, 4, 2, 5], k = 2

Goal:
Efficiently sort the array.

Typical Approach:
Maintain a min-heap of size k+1 to re-order elements with optimal time complexity.

5. First Unique Character in a Stream

You receive a continuous stream of characters and must return the first character that appears only once at any given time.

Typical Approach:

• Maintain a frequency map
• Use a queue to track candidates in order
• Continually remove non-unique characters from the queue head

The VOprep team has long accompanied candidates through various major company OAs and VOs, including Meta, Amazon, Citadel, SIG, providing real-time voice assistance, remote practice, and interview pacing reminders to help you stay smooth during critical moments. If you are preparing for these companies, you can check out our customized support plans—from coding interviews to system design, we offer full guidance to help you succeed.