American Express Software Engineer interview experience

I went in expecting a normal problem-solving setup, but the questions were leetcode-style and when I tried to use standard data-structure approaches like a stack, the interviewer shut that down and basically wouldn’t let me take that route. The solution expectation ended up being brute force.

As I worked through it, I realized they weren’t really evaluating my ability to pick clean structures or reason about optimality—they wanted a very specific kind of straightforward implementation. It made the exercise feel less like engineering judgment and more like getting to an answer they already