Amazon SDE 2 Interview Experience -Onsite
Summary
I went through four interview rounds including LLD, multiple DSA sessions, and a system design interview. I performed poorly on the first LLD but managed to solve the later DSA questions, and I am awaiting the outcome of the final round with a senior engineering manager.
Full Experience
Day 1
1. Round 1 (LLD) Design a playlist from the DJservice and the Recommendation service to mix the songs. Given the list of 10 requirements printed on paper. The core idea is to mix the songs coming from the Djservice and the recommendation service, in a custom proportion or in an equal proportion. Filters can be applied based on the user preferences.
Expectation is to write the production ready classes with proper syntax on paper.
Leadership principles - any situation where you pushed the customer back, have you made anything in thinking long term vision and did you sacrifice any short term goals for that.
2. Round 2 (DSA)
Q1 - Given two boxes of A[] , B[] with size n , where each element represents the sweetness, given the M students, distribute the sweetness of A , B to each child and you should minimize the total sweetness.
Q2 - Find the unoccupied seat position with the maximum distance to the occupied site.
seats[] = {'O','U','U','U','O','O'};
Answer - 2nd indexed seat
Leadership principles - outside of your responsibility, any process you have improved by yourself.
I messed up the first round, didn't able to code it properly. And coming to the second round I wrote the brute force solution for Q1 and optimal for Q2.
Is there any chances for the third round?
Day 3
Round 3) DSA
Scheduled another loop interview, virtually. I thought it will be HLD since they shared a website link similar to the exalicdraw, and they also shared the common coding space link.
Prepared for the HLD, but the interviewer asked me 2 DSA questions.
- Given the 2D array with 2 colours validate if it is a valid chessboard.
- LCS (longest common subsequence)
I feel lucky for both the DSA questions. Interviewer is asking all the approaches and all the time and space complexities and the expectation is to write the optimal code from scratch.
I wrote the recursive, memoization for 2nd, but interviewer asked for the tabulation as well. For these 2 questions the time limit is 45 mins. We have to explain our approaches before the coding.
Leadership principles -
- Any features that you implemented which you think customers don’t know they need but are required for the customer.
- How do you approach complex problems and whom you check with and how you solve it (something I don't remember exactly).
Interviewer is asking for multiple instances for both the questions not the single instance (maybe interviewer knows that everyone will have a single instance that they would have framed it).
Right after this round, after 20 mins HR scheduled the final round which is supposed to happen in a week. This final round is with some Engineering Leader from USA.
Guys do you think the final round is a bar raiser or is it part of the loop interview? What do you think I should focus for the final round? I know I haven't performed well in the first round.
Edit
Day 18
Round 4
Hi Guys,
Round - 4 with the Senior Eng manager was scheduled on Day 13, but due to the network issue, I asked HR to reschedule since the interviewer was unable to hear my voice. After that HR re‑scheduled it after 1 week on Day 18.
Interviewer set the expectation, and what she will ask in this round.
- Leadership principles
- Difference in opinion with the senior
- Case where I got critical feedback
- How you validate the AI tool output
- How you identified the AI generated code is wrong, and how you rectified it.
I answered mostly in favour of me. For the code validation I said I will check all the endpoints of the code where there is a touch point. She said so you will do the testing manually.
- HLD System design
Design a Youtube‑like system – Video Storage System.
FR:
- Upload video
- Download video
- Watch the video
- Search the video
I designed it on their website – bluescape. Mostly designed as expected with chunking, elastic search, manifest files, post‑processing the videos, Blob storage, CDN, S3 presigned URL, different video qualities. She was not interactive in nature. Finally she asked how you scale it and then she concluded the interview even when there were 10 mins left.
So guys what do you think based on the experience, do I have a chance here? I don't have any hope since I messed up their first Round LLD.
Interview Questions (3)
Distribute Sweetness to Minimize Total Sweetness
Given two arrays A[] and B[] of size n where each element represents a sweetness value, and given M students, distribute the sweetness from A and B to each child such that the total sweetness is minimized.
Find Unoccupied Seat with Maximum Distance
Given a seating arrangement represented as an array of characters where 'O' denotes an occupied seat and 'U' denotes an unoccupied seat, find the index of the unoccupied seat that has the maximum distance to the nearest occupied seat.
Example: seats[] = {'O','U','U','U','O','O'}; The answer is the seat at index 2 (0‑based).
Validate Chessboard Pattern
Given a 2‑dimensional array where each cell contains one of two colors, determine whether the array forms a valid chessboard pattern (no two adjacent cells, horizontally or vertically, share the same color).