Amazon Interview Experience | Set 349 (For SDE I)

Telephonic Round:

1. Given a 2D matrix with elements 1 and 0, where 1 is land and 0 is water. Find the number of islands.
2. Design a data structure which supports operations: insert, delete, find and findAny in constant time.

FACE TO FACE
Round 1:

1. Given an array which can be either of the following:
   Non-decreasing
   Non-increasing
   Increasing then decreasing
   Decreasing then increasing
2. Find the pivot element.
3. Find the first non-repeating character in a stream of integers.
4. Explain the situation where you had tight deadlines. What did you do to meet the deadline?
   Explain the situation where excess of work and you knew you could not meet the deadline. How did you manage then?

Round 2:

1. Print tree in a vertical order.
2. Minimum no of jumps to reach the end of array.
3. Given rods with different costs, combine the rods in a way such that you get the minimum cost.
4. When do we use which sort? Example of cases when merge sort is not used.
5. Explain heapify function of heap sort. Then explain with code what happens when you remove one element(max/min) from the heap.
6. Have you ever faced the situation when you did not meet the deadlines, but you thought you were good enough and were on the right track?
7. Have you ever faced the situation when you had to struggle to meet the deadlines? How did you divide/make progress with the work?

Round 3 (Hiring Manager):

1. Zigzag print of a binary tree.
2. Rearrange a string such that no two same characters are adjacent to each other.
3. Client calls server but gets delayed response. What could be multiple reasons? How could you improve upon them?

Round 4 (Hiring Manager):

1. Can you explain the situation where you have pushed/written your code and your manager didn’t approve of it, but you thought you had written the right code? What did you do then?
2. Have you been in a situation where you convinced your manager for something?
3. There is a call/request which takes some extra time in replying. Why could it possibly be? How do you remove that?
4. Explain caching. What happens when cache is full? Implement LRU cache. Write the code.
5. How do you manage work with strict deadlines? If ever you faced such situations.
6. What aspects do you have in your mind when you want to join amazon? What are your expectations out of it?
7. If you are given some work, how do define and manage it.
8. What will be your course of action if you are assigned some task which you don’t know at all?

Bar Raiser Round:

1. Given an array of integers, replace every number with the next higher number to its right. If a number can’t be replaced, we leave it as-it is.
   For example, the list: 5, 2, 1, 4, 6, 7 needs to be changed to 6, 4, 4, 6, 7, 7.
   4 different approaches were discussed and codes were to be written.
2. Why do you want to switch?
3. Why amazon?
4. Questions about current company, current project, team size, your roles and responsibilities, etc. were asked in almost all the rounds.

If you like neveropen and would like to contribute, you can also write an article and mail your article to review-team@neveropen.co.za. See your article appearing on the neveropen main page and help other Geeks.