Amazon Onsite Interview | SDE2 | Reject

I recently went through the Amazon SDE2 onsite interview process in Hyd, India. My journey began by qualifying through a CodeChef contest sponsored by Amazon, where I solved 5 problems in the April Long and 2 in the Cook-off challenge, leading to my profile being shortlisted.

The loop interviews started with Round 1: Design. This round had 20 minutes of Leadership Principles (LP) questions related to my current job, followed by 40 minutes for a system design problem: designing a Unix File Search API. I felt this round didn't go particularly well, suggesting I needed more practice in design questions.

Round 2: Design also began with 25 minutes of LP questions. The main focus then shifted to design questions specifically related to my current project, with numerous follow-up inquiries. I learned the importance of backing up each design consideration with quantifiable data or measurements.

The final technical round was Round 3: Algorithms. Again, the first 20 minutes were dedicated to LP questions. For the coding problems, I first tackled the Sliding Window Maximum problem, which I eventually solved using a deque implementation, thoroughly handling all cases and performing a dry run. The second problem was Largest Rectangle in Histogram. I could only come up with a brute force approach and ran out of time before I could develop a more optimal solution using a stack.

Ultimately, I received a rejection email. I believe the outcome was primarily due to my performance in Round 1 and Round 3.