Cracking Amazon SDE-1 is not as complicated as people make it sound.
I talked to multiple people who've been through it.
Here's exactly what you need to know π½
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Amazon SDE-1 mainly focuses on just 2 things:
1οΈβ£ DSA
2οΈβ£ Leadership Principles
That's it.
Yes Leadership Principles are real and they MATTER.
Don't ignore them thinking it's just HR fluff.
Amazon takes their culture seriously. Very seriously.
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What about your resume?
They might ask about it but usually surface level.
Unless your project directly connects to the role.
So don't spend months perfecting your resume.
Spend that time on DSA instead.
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Here's the truth about DSA prep for Amazon
It's actually manageable.
You don't need to grind 1000 problems.
You don't need to solve every Hard on LeetCode.
Just do 300 β 400 questions.
Pick ANY solid DSA sheet.
That is more than enough.
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Now the real alpha
After chatting with multiple friends about their Amazon interview experiences,
some patterns started showing up clearly.
These are the topics that keep appearing again and again π
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π Dynamic Programming (DP) problems that pop up often:
β’ Longest Common Subsequence
β’ 0/1 Knapsack
β’ Coin Change
β’ Longest Increasing Subsequence
β’ Edit Distance
β’ Partition Equal Subset Sum
β’ Word Break
β’ House Robber I & II
β’ Matrix Chain Multiplication
β’ Unique Paths
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π Graph problems that pop up often:
β’ Number of Islands
β’ Clone Graph
β’ Course Schedule I & II (Topological Sort)
β’ Word Ladder
β’ Dijkstra's Algorithm
β’ Detect Cycle in Directed & Undirected Graph
β’ Flood Fill
β’ Rotten Oranges
β’ Bipartite Graph Check
β’ Minimum Spanning Tree (Prim's / Kruskal's)
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Quick action plan if you're targeting Amazon:
β
Pick Striver's DSA sheet or NeetCode 150
β
Focus heavily on DP Graphs
β
Read all 16 Amazon Leadership Principles
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Prepare 2-3 STAR stories for each principle
β
Do mock interviews with friends
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Amazon is not impossible.
It just rewards people who prepare smart not just hard.
Know what they ask.
Practice what matters.
Show up confident.
That's the formula. π
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