3 step process. 1st is a Online Assessment. If you study your LeetCode this is really easy. If you do well enough here you get moved to the phone screening. If you do really good on the OA, they move you directly to the on-site. 2nd is a phone screening. I was moved directly to on-site so I don't know how this goes. 3rd is the on-site interview. Which in my case was incredibly unfair. Before the on-site, you have a meeting with other candidates in which a recruiter tells you about how the interviews will go and what to look out for. At this meeting, we were told twice that SDE1's are not expected to answer System Design questions. However, exactly 4 days before my scheduled interview day, I was told to sign up for BlueScape, which is a tool that AWS uses for System Design questions. So I only had 4 days to study up on System Design questions as a SDE1. During the interview day, I was asked multiple behavioral questions alongside 4 coding questions. The coding questions were very straightforward, again if you study enough LeetCode you will be fine. One of my interviewers (who was at the SDE2 level), did not understand how recursion worked. Which was a massive red flag for me but okay, I was able to explain and test my answer no problem. The final question I received was a System Design question which I answered to the best of my ability given the time I had. I did not receive an offer. They didn't give me any feedback but I know for a fact that it was because my response to the System Design, which is why I feel like it was incredibly unfair. Why on Earth would you tell a candidate that they didn't have to worry about System Design, then add a System Design question 4 days before the interview? Incredibly unfair and I hope that other candidates don't looking for a SDE1 role don't have the same experience.

Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.