Amazon (India)

Who can generally apply

• Amazon recruits students through campus placements at selected institutes and through its own university hiring postings, which are advertised individually on its jobs site.
• Each posting states its own degree requirements and expected graduation window. There is no single permanent eligibility rule across all Amazon university roles.
• Internship and full-time new-graduate roles are advertised separately and have different assessment formats.

What you must confirm yourself

• Amazon does not publish a marks cutoff, and you should be suspicious of any site that quotes one. Selection is dominated by performance in the assessment and the interview loop.
• Eligible graduation years, locations and role definitions are set per posting. Read the posting.
• Amazon states publicly that no Amazon-specific knowledge is needed to succeed in the assessment.

Stages

Amazon describes its overall shape as an online application, assessments, a phone screening, and an interview loop, while noting that the process differs from role to role.

The online assessment, as Amazon publishes it

For university SDE roles, Amazon publicly describes the online assessment as arriving by email and comprising:

• a coding assessment
• a workstyles assessment
• for full-time roles, a work simulation component, which interns do not get
• a short feedback survey

Amazon states that the assessment evaluates coding skills, technical problem solving, and Amazon's Leadership Principles, and that no Amazon-specific knowledge is needed to complete it.

Amazon publishes approximate durations for each component on that page. They are approximate, they have changed before, and the internship version is shorter than the full-time version. Read the current page rather than trusting a duration quoted anywhere else, including here.

The interview loop

Amazon does not publish a fixed number of interview rounds for university candidates, and it varies. Candidates commonly report a mix of coding interviews and behavioural interviews, with behavioural questions tied directly to the Leadership Principles. Amazon does publicly confirm that behavioural questions relate to the Leadership Principles and that technical interviews include coding and design components.

Practical notes from Amazon's own guidance

• Amazon offers a free online assessment practice test and recommends taking it beforehand.
• Amazon advises managing time strategically and moving past a problem you are stuck on rather than burning the clock.
• Amazon advises against using print screen and copy-paste during the assessment.

What Amazon officially lists for software development interviews

Amazon publishes the technical topic areas it expects SDE candidates to know:

• Programming language
• Data structures
• Algorithms
• Coding
• Object-oriented design
• Databases
• Distributed computing
• Operating systems
• Internet topics
• General machine learning and artificial intelligence

Amazon also says explicitly that interviewers are not evaluating your ability to memorise details in each area. They are looking for whether you can apply what you know to solve problems efficiently. It recommends reviewing computer science fundamentals and practising coding outside an IDE.

Data structures, in the depth actually needed

• Arrays, strings, hash maps, hash sets
• Stacks, queues, deques
• Linked lists, singly and doubly
• Trees, binary search trees, tries
• Heaps and priority queues
• Graphs, and their adjacency list representation

Algorithms

• Sorting and binary search, including binary search on an answer
• Two pointers and sliding window
• Recursion and backtracking
• Breadth-first and depth-first search, topological sort, shortest paths
• Dynamic programming, from one-dimensional through to grid and interval problems
• Greedy techniques and knowing when they fail
• Time and space complexity analysis, stated confidently and correctly

Design and systems

• Object-oriented design: model a real thing, such as a parking lot or an elevator, in classes with clear responsibilities
• Databases: schema design, indexes, SQL versus NoSQL trade-offs, transactions
• Operating systems: processes, threads, concurrency, locks, deadlock, memory
• Networking and internet topics: HTTP, DNS, caching, load balancing, what happens when you type a URL
• Distributed computing at a conceptual level: replication, partitioning, consistency trade-offs

Behavioural

• Amazon's Leadership Principles, read from Amazon's own page rather than a summary
• Several worked stories from your own experience, structured as situation, task, action, result, with specific detail and your own contribution rather than "we"
• Stories that cover failure and being wrong honestly, not only successes

If you have one to three years

This is the profile where a long runway matters most, because the bar is problem-solving skill that accumulates slowly.

• Start data structures and algorithms in your first or second year. This is not a final-semester subject. Consistent practice over eighteen months is the single highest-value thing you can do.
• Choose one language and get genuinely fluent, including its standard library containers. Fumbling with syntax under time pressure loses more offers than not knowing an algorithm.
• Build the habit of solving two or three problems a week, every week, rather than fifty in one month. Volume without spacing does not stick.
• Practise writing code in a plain editor with no autocomplete and no compiler, as Amazon itself recommends. Then compile it and see what you got wrong.
• Always state the complexity of your solution out loud, and always consider whether a better one exists. Interviewers score this explicitly.
• Learn to talk while you solve. Silent problem solving reads as being stuck, and Amazon interviewers evaluate your approach as much as your answer.
• Start collecting behavioural stories in your second year, from projects, teams, clubs and internships. Write them down as they happen. Nobody can invent five specific, honest stories the night before.
• Read the Leadership Principles properly and map your own experiences onto them. This is genuinely half the loop, and technically strong candidates fail here regularly.
• Take Amazon's own free practice assessment before the real one.
• Do interviews with a friend where you have to explain out loud under time pressure. It is a different skill from solving alone.

The honest caveat

Amazon publishes its topic list and its assessment structure, which makes the study plan above well grounded. It does not publish round counts, cutoffs, or India-specific campus criteria, and assessment durations have changed between cycles. Check the live posting and the current assessment page for anything specific.