Amazon Phone Screen Round | Rejected
Summary
I had a phone screen with Amazon where I solved a DSA problem and presented a system design, but was rejected the next day.
Full Experience
1. DSA Question - Given an array, the cost of adding two numbers is addition of two numbers, what is the minimum cost of adding all numbers. Solved within 10 minutes with running code.
2. HLD Design an Employee Directory for Amazon where employees can search for other employees and view their profile and organizational hierarchy. Requirements Search by name/email/employee ID View employee profile View manager/direct reports Assume ~1M employees Read-heavy Search should be fast
Follow ups:
- what if a person leaves
- get all the reportees under a person
Created the HLD on Exacildraw but there was some back and forth during api design and the Partition key for the dynamodb schema I told. Had very less time for the follow ups.
Got rejection next day itself. I was not expecting the rejection, still unable to understand what were they expecting.
Interview Questions (2)
Minimum Cost to Add All Numbers
Given an array of numbers, the cost of adding any two numbers is equal to the sum of those two numbers. Find the minimum total cost required to add all the numbers into a single sum.
Employee Directory System Design
Design an Employee Directory for a company with about one million employees. The system should allow searching by name, email, or employee ID, viewing an employee's profile, and navigating the organizational hierarchy (manager and direct reports). The workload is read‑heavy and searches must be fast. Follow‑up considerations include handling employee departures and retrieving all reportees under a manager.