Amazon SDE Intern Interview Experience 2026 | HackOn | 6-Month Internship | Selected

I recently interviewed for the SDE Intern position at Amazon through the Amazon HackOn event. I performed well in the HackOn Online Assessment, and shortly after that, I received an interest form from one of the recruiters to continue with the interview process.

Interview at a Glance

Interview Process and Timeline

The complete process consisted of an Online Assessment followed by two technical interview rounds.

The OA included coding, repository debugging, and a behavioral questionnaire. Both technical rounds focused on DSA along with discussions around my previous internship experience, impact, and behavioral scenarios.

Round-by-Round Experience

Online Assessment

Duration: 100 minutes
Platform: HackerRank

The OA consisted of two questions.

The first was an easy greedy DSA problem, with a time limit of around 40 minutes.

The second task was quite different. I had to find bugs in a given repository. I selected C++ as my language, and there was also an AI chatbot available to help understand the repository and its structure.

This part turned out to be easier than I initially expected because most of the issues were logical bugs rather than compilation errors.

After completing the OA, I had to take a Behavioral Questionnaire. There was no time limit for this section, and the questions were mostly based on workplace situations, behavior, and decision-making.

Technical Round 1

Duration: 60 minutes
Mode: Virtual via Zoom

I was asked two DSA problems:

Along with DSA, the interviewers asked me about my previous internship experience. These questions weren't deeply technical and were more focused on my experiences and situations related to Amazon's Leadership Principles.

I was able to solve both coding problems and cleared this round.

Technical Round 2

Duration: 60 minutes
Mode: Virtual via Zoom

The main coding problem was:

Problem Statement: Given a string s, rearrange its characters so that no two adjacent characters are the same. Return any valid rearrangement, or "" if it is impossible.
Similar to:

We discussed multiple approaches, starting from brute-force logic and moving towards a Priority Queue-based solution.

I eventually implemented a simpler approach using frequency tracking, with a time complexity of O(N).

After the coding discussion, the conversation shifted towards AI. The interviewer asked about its uses, impact, and challenges. We also discussed whether I had used AI in my projects or previous internships, the challenges I encountered while using it, and how I handled them.

The interviewer then went deeper into my previous internship experience, mainly trying to understand the impact of my work and my contribution to the team.

Final Result

I was able to clear the second technical round as well. About a week later, I received the selection mail for Amazon's 6-month SDE Internship from January to June 2027.

Overall, the process was fairly smooth. DSA was important, but the interviews also placed noticeable emphasis on previous experience, impact, behavioral situations, and how I approached problems.