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Summary
I applied for an SDE-2 position at Amazon Hyderabad through a referral. After successfully navigating through multiple rounds of coding, low-level design, high-level design, and behavioral questions, I received an offer.
Full Experience
Back in February, after applying for an SDE-2 position at Amazon Hyderabad, I completed the online assessment, which was quite easy. Although I was initially told there were no openings in Hyderabad, I got a call in July informing me about available SDE-2 roles there. I confirmed my interest and was scheduled for in-person interviews at the Amazon Hyderabad campus.
Round 1: Leadership Principles + Coding
This round, conducted by two SDE-2s, started with leadership principle questions. For coding, I was given two problems:
- I solved Maximum Points You Can Obtain from Cards in 15 minutes, detailing my logic from brute force to the optimized solution, then coding and dry-running it.
- For Asteroid Collision, my initial solution had a mistake, which I found during the dry run. After a hint and some thought, I came up with a working solution and was able to code it within the remaining time.
Round 2: Leadership Principles + Low-Level Design (Tic-Tac-Toe)
This round began with four leadership principle questions. Afterward, I was tasked with the low-level design of a Tic-Tac-Toe game. I listed the entities, explained the game's mechanics and termination conditions, and answered several follow-up questions. Finally, I drew a class diagram and wrote the C++ code for the game-over check method.
Round 3: Leadership Principles + High-Level Design (Event Booking System)
This round started with questions about my current project and more leadership principles. After about 30 minutes, I designed an event booking system on the whiteboard. This round concluded late, and I was informed that the final round would be virtual.
Round 4: (Virtual – Bar Raiser): Leadership Principles + 2 Coding Questions
The final virtual round included more leadership principle questions, followed by two coding problems:
- House Robber II
- Boats to Save People
I successfully answered and coded solutions for both questions.
Final Discussion
On the same day as my last round, HR called to discuss the interview and requested details about my current CTC, notice period, total experience, and preferred location. A couple of days later, I received the call from HR informing me that I was selected!
Interview Questions (6)
You are given an integer array cardPoints and an integer k. In one step, you can take one card from the beginning or from the end of the row. You have to take exactly k cards. Your score is the sum of the points of the cards you have taken. Return the maximum score you can obtain. For example, if cardPoints = [1,2,3,4,5,6,1], k = 3, you can take three cards from the left 1,2,3 (total 6), three cards from the right 5,6,1 (total 12), or a mix like 1,6,1 (total 8). The maximum score is 12.
We are given an array asteroids of integers representing asteroids in a row. For each asteroid, the absolute value represents its size, and the sign represents its direction (positive means right, negative means left). Each asteroid moves at the same speed. Find the state of the asteroids after all collisions. If two asteroids meet, the smaller one explodes. If both are the same size, both explode. If an asteroid and another moving in the same direction meet, they never collide. Return an array of the remaining asteroids.
Design a Tic-Tac-Toe game. I was asked to list down all the entities involved in the game, explain how the game works from start to finish, and how it determines when the game ends. Following this, I had to draw a class diagram and implement, in C++, the method responsible for checking if the game is over (e.g., win condition, draw).
Design an event booking system on a whiteboard. This involves considering various aspects such as system components, database choices, APIs, scalability, and how to handle concurrent bookings, user authentication, and notifications.
You are a professional robber planning to rob houses along a street. Each house has a certain amount of money stashed. All houses are arranged in a circle. That means the first house is the neighbor of the last one. Meanwhile, adjacent houses have security systems connected, and it will automatically contact the police if two adjacent houses are broken into on the same night. Given an integer array nums representing the amount of money of each house, return the maximum amount of money you can rob tonight without alerting the police.
You are given an array people where people[i] is the weight of the i-th person, and an infinite number of boats where each boat can carry a maximum weight limit. Each boat carries at most two people at a time, provided their combined weight is no more than the limit. Return the minimum number of boats to carry every given person.