Amazon SDE 2 interview experience - Onsite

Day 1

1. Round 1 (LLD) (F2F)
Design a playlist from the DJservice and the Recommendation service to mix the songs. Given a 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) (F2F)

Q1 – Given two boxes of A[] , B[] with size n , where each element represents the sweetness, given 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 seat.
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 code it properly. For the second round I wrote a brute‑force solution for Q1 and an optimal solution for Q2.

Is there any chance for the third round?

Day 3

Round 3 (DSA) (Virtual)

Scheduled another loop interview, virtually. I thought it would be HLD since they shared a website link similar to Excalidraw and also shared a common coding space link. I prepared for HLD, but the interviewer asked me two DSA questions.

1. Given the 2‑D array with 2 colours, validate if it is a valid chessboard.
2. LCS (Longest Common Subsequence).

I felt lucky for both DSA questions. The interviewer asked for all approaches, time and space complexities, and expected me to write the optimal code from scratch. I wrote the recursive and memoization solutions for LCS, and the interviewer also asked for a tabulation solution. Each question had a 45‑minute time limit, and we had to explain our approaches before coding.

Leadership principles –

1. Any features that you implemented which you think customers don’t know they need but are required for them.
2. How do you approach complex problems, whom do you check with, and how do you solve them (something I don’t remember exactly).

Right after this round, after 20 minutes, HR scheduled the final round, which is supposed to happen in a week. This final round is with an Engineering Senior Manager from the USA on the same hiring team.

Guys, do you think the final round is a bar raiser or part of the loop interview? What should I focus on for the final round? I know I haven’t performed well in the first round.