Amazon Interview Experience

Just got my result back from Amazon.

Rejected.

Definitely the cherry on top of my recruiting cycle for Summer 2026.

I wanted to write about my experience interviewing with Amazon while it is still fresh in my head. Not because it was some huge success story, but because I think there are a lot of lessons here that I need to actually sit with.

I applied back in the fall and did not hear back until March to set up the interview. By the time it came around, it felt like one of those opportunities that had been floating in the background for so long that it almost did not feel real anymore. Then suddenly it was on the calendar.

The interview was two back-to-back virtual interviews. Each one was split roughly into 20 percent behavioral and 80 percent technical.

Honestly, I think I tripped up more on the behavioral part than the technical part.

For the behavioral questions, I do not think I did a good enough job explaining my projects and experience to the interviewer. I was explaining things from my own perspective, with all the background context already in my head. The problem is that the interviewer did not have that context. I needed to slow down and tell the story in a way that someone completely new to the project could understand.

That is something I need to work on. I know what I built. I know why certain decisions mattered. But knowing it is different from communicating it clearly.

For the technical portion, I did not really trip on the coding question itself. What caught me off guard was the depth of the follow-up questions. I wish I had a stronger understanding of the details behind my answers, like how a hash map is implemented in Python and why certain operations are efficient. I was focused on getting to the optimal solution, but I needed to be more ready to explain the mechanics underneath it.

The first interviewer was really nice, and that interview went pretty smoothly. The question was honestly so easy that it kind of tripped me up. I think I overthought it because I expected something harder.

Lesson learned: relax next time. Ask better questions before coding. Do not rush into the solution just because the problem looks simple.

The second interview was rougher. My interviewer was about 20 minutes late, which threw me off a little. That is not an excuse, but it definitely changed the energy going in. I also needed to do a much better job explaining SANA. I care a lot about that project, but I did not explain it in a clean enough way.

I also asked a pretty bad ending question. I do not want to talk about it.

Overall, this was definitely a letdown. I was hoping to break into big tech before entering my final year because that would have set me up really well for new grad recruiting. But I guess it is not my time yet, and that is okay.

I learned a lot from this interview. I need to get better at telling project stories. I need to ask clearer questions before coding. I need to build more depth in Python and data structures instead of only focusing on pattern matching the optimal solution.

This one hurts, but it also gave me a clear list of things to fix before new grad interviews.