Top DSA, System Design, and Leadership Principles questions for Amazon SDE-1 — with a structured prep roadmap.
2 DSA coding problems (90 min) on HackerRank + Workstyle Assessment (situational judgment test).
1-2 DSA problems + technical discussion. Focus on Arrays, Strings, Trees, Graphs.
4-5 rounds: 2-3 coding + 1 system design + 1 Leadership Principles behavioral round.
A senior Amazonian evaluates your Leadership Principle answers and overall fit for raising Amazon's hiring bar.
Most frequently asked DSA problems in Amazon OA and technical rounds.
Two Sum — find two numbers that add to a target.
Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters.
Merge Two Sorted Lists.
LRU Cache — design and implement.
Word Search in a 2D grid.
Number of Islands — BFS/DFS.
Serialize and Deserialize a Binary Tree.
Find the Kth Largest Element in an array.
Maximum Product Subarray.
Median of Two Sorted Arrays.
Amazon evaluates every candidate against its 14 Leadership Principles. Prepare STAR stories for each.
Answer using the STAR method (Situation, Task, Action, Result).
Tell me about a time you had to make a difficult decision quickly. (Bias for Action / Ownership)
Describe a situation where you disagreed with your manager. (Have Backbone)
Tell me about a project you're most proud of and why. (Deliver Results)
How have you handled a situation where you didn't have enough data to make a decision? (Are Right, A Lot)
Describe a time you improved a process or system. (Invent and Simplify)
Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned. (Learn and Be Curious)
Focus on Arrays, Strings, Trees, Graphs, DP. Prioritize Medium difficulty. Amazon loves Graph and Tree problems.
Have ready stories for: failure, conflict, innovation, going above and beyond, and customer focus.
For SDE-1, know Load Balancers, Databases (SQL vs NoSQL), Caching, and API design at a basic level.
Practice explaining your thought process out loud. Interviewers evaluate how you think, not just whether you solve it.
Structured DSA roadmap + System Design prep + LP story builder on TomoLink.
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