Amazon || SDE - 2 || 3 YOE || Accepted offer

Hello folks, have recently interviewed at amazon and got an offer. Previous interview experiences were really key in cracking these rounds. Hence doing my bit by sharing my experience.

I have a total of 3 yrs of experience of working at quick commerce startups (swiggy and zepto)

First round: DM’ed a recruiter looking for openings, soon within 3 days she shared a hacker rank link. This contained 2 DSA questions (both medium). First question was a binary search based and another on trees. Post that there were some LP based questions (choice based questions).

It took my recruiter almost 2 weeks to get back and another 10 days to schedule an interview.

Second Round: This was a System design round, the objective was to design an auction platform. Interviewer focussed primarily on DB schemas, scaling and designing low latency apis (caching). No LP was asked instead the interviewer asked to explain any interesting project from my past work.

Follow ups:

1. How do you handle edits to bids ( I suggesting allowing multiple bids rather than providing an edit option.)
2. How would you support a near real-time leaderboard (redis sorted sets)
3. How would you identify/track the winning bid (can’t rely on redis as source of truth)

I relied on hello interview for my prep, although I hadn’t previously solved this question I was able to come up with an acceptable solution in time.

Verdict: Passed, got good feedback from the interviewer.

Third round: LLD discussion with Hiring manager, although this was supposed to be a LLD round, the interviewer primarily focused on my work ex at zepto and my design choices from my projects. We also discussed if we could build an inventory service using NoSQL (zepto uses SQL). Last 10 mins were focused on explaining what design pattern was used in some of my old projects. No LPs asked in this round.

Verdict: Got positive feedback. I was worried cuz interviewer never asked any LLD question.

Round 3: DSA round, a younger SDE-2 was the interviewer. First question - Implement an interface to navigate browser history. Second question - Implement basic arithmetic operations like +,-,*,/ without using any inbuilt functions.

I used golang to write the code, and was able to implement both of these in time. Although the interviewer wasn’t aware of this language and I had to explain the basics to him. Also I felt the interviewer was neither interested in understanding a diff language nor was able to ask follow ups properly

Verdict: Positive but slightly hesitant.

Bar raiser: Was asked questions based on LPs related to ownership. 2 DSA questions, 1) rotten oranges (graph BFS) 2) Asteriod collisions (Stack)

Heard back from the recruiter in two days, got an offer.

Offer - 46L base, 29L joining bonus (over 2 years) and 38L esops