Amazon

I applied for the Software Engineer Intern role at American Express and got shortlisted for the interview after the initial screening. The interview itself was not structured like a long sequence of back-to-back coding rounds. Instead, it felt more like a technical discussion where the interviewer wanted to understand both my problem-solving ability and the projects I had actually worked on. The interview started with a short introduction. Rather than spending too much time on general background questions, the interviewer moved fairly quickly into coding. I was given two DSA problems, and neither of them was extremely difficult. The first one was based on the subset-sum pattern. I initially explained the straightforward approach and then discussed how I could optimize it using dynamic programming. The interviewer was more interested in how I reached the solution than in seeing me immediately jump to the final code. The interesting part was the debugging aspect. I was asked to think about how I would identify and fix issues in a solution rather than simply writing code from scratch. I had to explain what could go wrong, how I would reproduce the problem, and what I would check first. That made the discussion feel different from a typical LeetCode-only interview. After the coding portion, most of the conversation shifted toward my resume projects. I was asked to explain what I had personally contributed, why I selected certain technologies, and what difficulties I encountered while building the projects. One question that stood out was about my journey so far and what I expected to learn from the internship. I tried to keep the answer specific instead of giving a generic “I want to learn and grow” response. Overall, the interview was fairly balanced. The DSA questions tested fundamentals, while the project discussion checked whether I genuinely understood the work mentioned on my resume. I was able to handle the technical discussion and eventually received the selection confirmation.