Amazon SDE-2 Contract Role Online Assessment

This Amazon opportunity started a little differently for me. Instead of applying through the usual careers portal or a referral, I sent a cold email to the hiring manager. That eventually gave me a chance to take the online assessment for an SDE-2 one-year contract role.

Experience: 4 years
Tech Stack: Java Backend

DSA Coding | 40 Minutes

The first problem was based on an inventory allocation system. Each customer had a bid amount and requested quantity. Higher bids received priority, while customers with equal bids had to be served in a round-robin manner.

I had to allocate the available inventory and finally return the customers whose requests were not completely fulfilled.

I understood the approach, but handling equal bids along with the remaining inventory took some time. I couldn't get all the test cases to pass and submitted a partial solution.

Spring Boot Debugging | 60 Minutes

Next, I was given an existing Spring Boot movie API that supported filters such as celebrity, director, rating, popularity and title.

My task was to find the issues in the existing implementation and fix them so that all the provided unit tests passed.

I managed to identify and fix some of the problems, but the different filter combinations and edge cases consumed time. I again ended up submitting with partial test cases passing.

Work Simulation

The technical assessment was followed by a 15-minute work simulation and a 10-minute work-style survey.

These sections focused more on workplace situations, decision-making and how I would approach different scenarios rather than technical knowledge.

I was not selected after the assessment. It was disappointing because I understood a large part of both technical tasks, but this experience also showed me that understanding the approach and completing a working solution within a fixed time are two different things.

If I were attempting the same assessment again, I would focus much more on timed practice and getting every edge case covered before submission.