Amazon reports often mix coding with Leadership Principles, but the balance differs by interviewer and candidate. These examples are useful because the writers describe particular rounds, not because they define a guaranteed Amazon loop.
\nThis page compares SDE-1 intern and University Grad experiences with an L5 backend report. The sources range from 2024 and 2025 hiring cycles to an intern report collected in October 2026. The reported stages include online assessments, technical interviews, and behavioral follow-ups. Read the role and date beside each question before using it to plan practice.
\nOne candidate could not recall one OA prompt but remembered Find Longest Self-Contained Substring. The same report's first technical round included House Robber and a streaming class that reports the longest consecutive sequence after each number is added. These are the prompts as described in the Amazon SDE-1 University Grad report (2025).
\nA selected Bangalore University Grad candidate described three technical rounds:
\nRound 1: Find the median from a stream of numbers (source); find the maximum-sum level in a binary tree (source). Both appear in the Amazon SDE-1 Bangalore report (2025).
\nRound 2: Find the single element in a sorted array (source); remove consecutive linked-list nodes whose sum is zero (source). The behavioral follow-ups were “Have you ever helped a peer at work?” (source) and “Have you ever missed a deadline?” (source).
\nRound 3: Find the distance between two nodes when each node knows its parent but not its children (source). The interviewer then changed the root's parent condition and asked for lower space use (same source). This is a useful example of a follow-up changing the data assumptions, not a separate canonical problem.
\nThe Bangalore report also describes a three-part assessment: DSA, work simulation, and behavioral questions. It does not name both OA coding questions, so they are not guessed here.
\nA newer intern report describes one DSA problem, Searching for an Element in a Stream. Follow-ups asked the candidate to first assume the stream was infinite, then consider its maximum size, explain how an unordered set works internally, solve the task without unordered_set or unordered_map, and optimize further. Those are the details recorded in the Amazon SDE I intern Round 1 report (2026).
The same report includes the behavioral question “Have you made any mistakes while working in a team during the past year?” and a follow-up about trusting teammates. The writer does not name the DSA problem beyond “Searching for an Element in a Stream”; no standard problem equivalent is asserted here.
\nAn L5 backend candidate reported a vegetable-cancellation array problem (source) and a painting-timing problem (source) in the OA, followed by a graph-ranking DSA problem (source). The full statements are in the Amazon L5 backend experience (2025). Its later rounds included low-level design and work-style assessment; use the source for the full constraints rather than assuming it matches an SDE-1 loop.
\nPractice a prompt through its follow-ups. For streaming data, explain how state changes after each input. For linked lists and trees, state what each node can access before proposing a traversal. For behavioral rounds, prepare specific stories about helping a teammate, handling a missed deadline, and taking ownership. Our guides to behavioral interviews and system design cover those preparation skills.
\nThe LeetCode collection adds several separate SDE II accounts. These are independent candidate experiences, not a combined Amazon loop.
\nOne candidate described a first-unique-character task that changed as characters arrived in a stream, then a directed-graph reachability problem built from URL pairs. The same report also names two design prompts:
\nfind command API. (same report)A separate September 2026 SDE-2 account names four more coding prompts and two system-design prompts:
\nA separate candidate report groups these questions under system design and behavioral discussion. It does not assign every prompt to a precise round:
\nA separate intern OA report lists task areas but the captured notes do not preserve full problem statements. They are included as reported themes, not reconstructed questions: return-category eligibility, return-window validation, linked-account aggregation, order-value scoring, risk scoring, and auto-approve/manual-review/reject decisions. (LeetCode SDE-1 intern OA report)
\nThe intern technical report also includes two behavioral questions alongside the stream-search problem already listed above: “Have you made any mistakes while working in a team during the past year?” and “Why did you blindly trust your teammates?” (LeetCode SDE I intern report)
\nOne SDE-1 candidate reported a hard linked-list problem and a separate problem involving a multiset and binary search, but did not publish enough detail to restate either task. (LeetCode SDE-1 report) Another SDE II candidate described a problem as similar to Aggressive Cows without providing the full variant in the collected notes. (LeetCode SDE II report)
\nNo. The University Grad SDE-1, Bangalore SDE-1, SDE I intern, and L5 backend accounts describe different roles and stages. Read each report separately and confirm the current format for the specific opening.
\nUse the role and level in the source report to narrow your practice set. Parlel's company directory is a starting point for mapping target teams before you reach out.
\nDheeraj Kumar, founder building Parlel, an open professional network for people, companies, and jobs. Find him on his Parlel profile.
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