Amazon SDE 1 interview process for new grads

You are trying to map a campus or off-campus pipeline onto the generic Amazon process, and the names do not quite line up. This section lays out the stages new-grad SDE 1 candidates actually sit, and where intern conversions skip them. The short version: assessment, phone, then a Loop on Amazon Chime.

• Online assessment. Coding problems plus a work-style survey built around the Leadership Principles.
• Phone screen. A shared editor, plus at least one behavioral probe.
• The Loop. 4 to 5 interviews, commonly back to back on Amazon Chime, with a Bar Raiser.

Most external new-grad and fresher candidates start with that assessment. Doing well does not start a shared clock. A recruiter or hiring manager then runs one or two phone screens. The Loop follows. Interns with a return offer, and some campus pipelines, skip the assessment or collapse screens. Ask your recruiter which of those applies; do not infer it from a thread. How other employers structure the same journey is on the company interviews topic.

The machinery is the same: Amazon Chime, Leadership Principles, a Bar Raiser. The substance is calibrated down. SDE 1 coding stays in data structures and algorithms rather than a long design. Behavioral stories are allowed to come from internships, class projects, and campus work, as long as you can say what you personally did and what changed.

What does not get easier is follow-up. Interviewers still drill one story until the numbers and the trade-offs run out. A thin internship story fails the same way a thin senior story fails. Prepare 6 to 8 distinct stories mapped to principles, even if every story happened in one summer.

Rehearsing those stories out loud, including the follow-ups, is the highest-yield hour. The mock interview tool can run Leadership Principle style rounds against your own resume until STAR is automatic.

Amazon publishes four to six interviews of 45 to 60 minutes each; candidates commonly report them running back to back on Amazon Chime with short breaks. Mix coding, a deeper technical conversation, and behavioral time with the Bar Raiser. Every interviewer can still spend the last minutes on your questions, and every interviewer can still write Leadership Principles evidence even after a coding hour.

A CS senior interviewing off-campus for SDE 1 is a common case. Her OA arrived first. Two weeks later a phone screen used a shared editor. Loop day was four Amazon Chime sessions: two coding, one project deep dive, and one Bar Raiser hour. Nothing in the day was improvised. The surprise was a Leadership Principle question at the end of a coding round she had treated as purely technical.

Test Amazon Chime before the morning. It is not Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams, and the join link is easy to ignore until it is not.

Online assessments can request camera or screen permissions depending on role and region. Treat any of those as out of scope for AI assistance, whatever a tool claims. A coding round that shares your editor is the same: the interviewer sees the screen.

Spoken Loop conversations on your own machine are a different surface. SubcueAI's native macOS and Windows app captures system audio plus your microphone into a floating local overlay. A browser extension Side Panel does live assist for a meeting tab on Chromium browsers, capturing only that tab's audio. No meeting bot joins the call, and nothing is injected into the meeting page.

For SDE 1 the honest use in a Chime behavioral round is a reminder of which of your own stories fits the principle, not a script. The numbers still have to be yours. Architecture and limits are on the detectability topic.