Amazon Software Development Engineer interview questions

Applied online and then quite a while later (1-2 months) I got an email inviting me to come to Seattle for an on-site interview. There was no phone interview or anything like that. The day of the interview, all the candidates were split into groups of 3 and we were given a problem to complete, which was very clearly separated into 3 parts. All of the parts involved some sort of minimization problem and one of them, the one I chose, involved making predictions based on historical data and then minimizing costs based on the prediction. I got the impression that they kind of wanted us to work together but the problems weren't too related to each other and they said that we were not supposed to do any pair programming so that didn't really happen. We just worked on our problems and then periodically had short meetings with Amazon engineers to talk about our progress (I think there were 3 of these throughout the day). At the end, we submitted our code and then had a short info session with some more engineers and that was it. Overall, it was a pretty good way to do interviews, I think. Definitely gave them a lot more info about my skills than most interviews do.

Group Coding Interview I have been called for special round where people from different universities are grouped into a team size of 3. We were given three problems to work on, all of them are independent of each other and will be evaluated only on the performance of the individual. Although, they will assess our team collaboration skills. There is very less information across the web for this Group Interview and it was very difficult to predict how it going to be and prepare for it. I signed NDA so I cannot reveal the questions but I will give the best information which is not discussed elsewhere. Interview starts at 9:30 AM and you will have some info session with the dev's. You will be given the question at around 10 Am and will have a chance to pick up a task from 3 tasks assigned for the group. The panel will reach to your table at around 10:30-10:45 and will have a 15 min Q&A session on your approach. You will have the chance to code for until 2:00 PM, after which you need to report to the panel about your status for about 15 minutes. Later, 30 min interview very relevant to the coding exercise and a final 15 min session. You need to wrap up things by around 4:30-5 PM. Ultimately, you will be left with 4 - 4:30 hour for the coding exercise. The tasks were not very difficult, you need to think how you can code the solution in 4 hours. It is very important to come up with some working solution rather than a fancy one. I almost came up with a very elegant OO code but failed to finish and make it run. I complicated myself, so are others. I could hardly see anyone turning up a solution. Advice: Prepare well with the data structures, advanced ones like interval trees etc. Have good knowledge about algorithms like Bellman ford, Knapsack and many more.etc. No need to stress on Design Patterns. Collaborate well with the team. Practice some coding challenges which can be solved in 3-4 hours (Most Important). It is all about your thinking process and the speed,accuracy with which you can code. Enjoy Seattle !