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Summary
I interviewed for an L5 SDE-II position at Amazon in Hyderabad. The process involved an online assessment, followed by several onsite rounds covering DSA, Low-Level Design (LLD), High-Level Design (HLD), and behavioral questions including a Bar Raiser. Despite good performance in most rounds, I was ultimately rejected, attributing the decision primarily to a lukewarm LLD round.
Full Experience
Hey folks! Just wanted to spill some tea (okay, maybe just share an experience) about my interview journey with Amazon — could come in handy if you're prepping or just here for the drama. 🍿
🎓 Background Check : B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from one of the top 10 IITs. Yep, that’s right — not just good at thermodynamics, also decent at “dynamic programming”.
Experience:
🧑💻 10 months in one of the Big Service based MNC. 💻 3 years in a Product-Based Company.
🗓 Timeline of Events:- ⚔️ Round 1 - The Online Assessment (Jan ‘25) Two questions.
i). One medium. ✅ ii). One hard (only Half the test cases passed). ❌ Both questions were graph-based.
☎️ HR Call (Mar ‘25) Out of the blue, a call came. HR summoned me for more rounds.
🧠 Round 2 - DSA (Mar ‘25) - taken by SDE 2 It started with some basic discussion on my earlier projects & challenges that I have faced in them. Then, 2 DSA Questions:
i). Binary Search (medium) ✅ ii). Arrays (medium, needed a lifeline aka hint) ✅ Duration: ~60 mins
🧱 Round 3 - LLD (Mar ‘25) - taken by Senior EM Senior EM took this round. i). Deep dive into past experience and… drumroll — Amazon’s leadership principles! Eg). “Tell me about a time you convinced your team…” ii). “SQL vs NoSQL?” (I tried my best to sound like a DB ninja — threw in scale, schema flexibility, latency… the works. Still looked unconvinced 😅) iii). Rate Limiter LLD. I Designed classes/interfaces, Coded Sliding Window Algorithm in Rate limiter. But he did not seem satisfied with me responses to some of the follow up questions that he asked about scaling it to high traffic. Duration: ~60 mins
🌐 Round 4 - HLD (Apr ‘25) - taken by EM i). Discussion on Amazon leadership principles. ii). Task: Design a URL shortener. I Talked about microservices, caching, DBs, CDN etc. Drew a HLD & expalined the DB schema, cache storage, scheduler, data archival. Everything that I could think of. Duration: ~60 mins
💪 Round 5 - Bar Raiser (Apr'25 End) - taken by principal SDE After around 3 weeks, I got a call from HR for my Bar Raiser round. i). Discussion on Amazon leadership principles - initiatives that I have taken in my current role. ii). Sliding window problem - find the longest substring with no repeating character. Solved it in given time. iii). Given a set of recipes & their corresponding ingredients. We need to identify groups of recipes that can be made using the same ingredients. Recipe 1:- [flour, apple, egg] Recipe 2:- [rice, apple, sugar] Recipe 3:- [apple, flour, egg]
Group 1 :- Recipe 1 & 3 Group 2 :- Recipe 2 I Expalined 2 approaches to solve this problem.
Duration: ~60 mins
🫠 Finale - No Offer. All the round went very good except Round 3. Round 3 was neither bad nor too good, it went okay & that round played a vital role in final Verdict.
The interviewers were very firendly & helpful. Also, HR was very supportive & made this whole process smooth.
So yeah… Verdict: Rejection #12 in past one year 🥳 Added to my growing “Hall of Fame: Close but No Offer” wall. 😂
Interview Questions (6)
Tell me about a time you convinced your team to adopt your idea or approach.
Discuss the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases, including their use cases, scalability, schema flexibility, and latency considerations.
Design a low-level rate limiter. You need to design classes/interfaces and implement an algorithm like Sliding Window for rate limiting. Be prepared for follow-up questions about scaling it to high traffic.
Design a URL shortener system. Discuss microservices, caching, databases, CDNs, and draw an HLD. Explain the database schema, cache storage, scheduler, and data archival strategies.
Given a string s, find the length of the longest substring without repeating characters.
Given a set of recipes and their corresponding ingredients, identify groups of recipes that can be made using the same set of ingredients (order and duplicates of ingredients don't matter for grouping). Example: Recipe 1: [flour, apple, egg], Recipe 2: [rice, apple, sugar], Recipe 3: [apple, flour, egg]. Expected output: Group 1: Recipe 1 & 3, Group 2: Recipe 2.