Amazon | SDE 2 | 4th time rejected | Jan 2026 | Bangalore
Summary
I interviewed for an SDE 2 role at Amazon in Bangalore, undergoing a phone screen, three DSA rounds, and one system design round. Despite performing well in most technical and behavioral rounds, I believe my performance in the system design round led to my fourth rejection from the company.
Full Experience
Current total exp - 6.5 yrs
Phone Screen(1 hour)
- Problem: Partition to K Equal Sum Subsets (LC Hard).
- I gave sorting in asc order then using two pointer approach. We both were not able to find where it will fail, but we knew it will fail :-)
- Final approach: Backtracking with recursion, just told the skeleton and explained due to time constraints
- Discussion around pruning and optimization.
Then recruiter scheduled four loop rounds, one was system design and other three DSA.
DSA round 1:
- LP1: Tell a time where you broke production system or you were on call while it broke, what steps you take and how did you resolve ?
- LP2: Tell a time where you lead/develop a technical project. How did you proceed about the same ? what was the success metric for project
- Problem 1: Find min element in rotated sorted array
- Problem 2: https://leetcode.com/problems/132-pattern/description/
I was able to answer first three correctly, but only discussed approach for the third one and implemented the O(n^2 logn) approach.
LP took around 15 mins of total one hour
DSA Round 2:
- LP1: Tell me a time where you took lead and saw some issues and resolve them ?
- LP2: Tell me a time where you faced tight deadlines and how do you ensure that those are met
- Problem 1: Flight connectivity problem(Given flights from city a to B and source/dest is given) → check if destination reachable.
-> Solved using graph + BFS/DFS.
-> Follow-up: flights with departure/arrival times, requiring path validation with time constraints.
I was able to code answer first three, for third there were bugs in the code but approach discussed was fine.
DSA Round 3:
- LP1: When did you solve a complex problem with simple solution
- LP2: Time when you disagreed with you rmanager and commit
- Design question: EC2 instance discount system.
-> Implemented using Strategy Pattern with multiple discount types.
-> Focus on clean OOP design and extensibility.
I was able to answer all three correctly(afaik)
System Design:
- Design “People who bought this also bought that” recommendation system.
- Used order history to compute product associations.
- Architecture: Order events → aggregation → recommendation store → API.
- Discussed precomputation, caching, and scalable storage (NoSQL/Elastic).
-> This is the round where I think I screwed up big time, was nervous and did not understood/discussed the problem in depth and jumped straight to FR/NFR.
-> And when I tried to satisfy my FR I was fumbling, didn't had the clear path what I need to implement.
-> At end interviewer also gave hints which I was not able to use correctly.
After following up with recruiter for 2 weeks, I got the rejection mail. It specifically mentioned that its is policy of amazon that they don't provide individual feedback. IDK when the policy changed coz for the last three times I got rejected I every time I got the feedback from recruiter itself.
You can find my hat-trick of amazon rejections here: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/2491633/amazon-sde-2-bangalore-july-2022-rejecte-gvgn/
Not at all sad, just saying !
Hope this helps !
Cheers !!
Interview Questions (12)
Partition to K Equal Sum Subsets
The problem involved partitioning an array into K equal sum subsets. It was noted as a LeetCode Hard problem.
Leadership Principle: Production System Breakage & Resolution
Tell a time where you broke a production system or you were on call while it broke, what steps you took and how you resolved it.
Leadership Principle: Leading/Developing a Technical Project
Tell a time where you led or developed a technical project. How did you proceed about the same? What was the success metric for the project?
Find Minimum in Rotated Sorted Array
Find the minimum element in a rotated sorted array.
132 Pattern
The problem was LeetCode's '132 Pattern'.
Leadership Principle: Taking Lead on Issues and Resolution
Tell me a time where you took the lead and saw some issues, then resolved them.
Leadership Principle: Facing Tight Deadlines
Tell me a time where you faced tight deadlines and how you ensured that those were met.
Flight Connectivity Problem with Time Constraints
Given flights from city A to B and a source/destination, check if the destination is reachable. A follow-up involved flights with departure/arrival times, requiring path validation with time constraints.
Leadership Principle: Solving Complex Problems Simply
When did you solve a complex problem with a simple solution?
Leadership Principle: Disagreement with Manager and Commitment
Tell me about a time when you disagreed with your manager and committed to a path forward.
EC2 Instance Discount System Design
Design an EC2 instance discount system. The implementation focused on using the Strategy Pattern with multiple discount types, emphasizing clean OOP design and extensibility.
Design 'People who bought this also bought that' Recommendation System
Design a 'People who bought this also bought that' recommendation system. The discussion included using order history to compute product associations, architecture involving order events, aggregation, a recommendation store, and an API, as well as precomputation, caching, and scalable storage (NoSQL/Elastic).