My Amazon SDE 2 (L5) Interview Journey

I interviewed with Amazon for an SDE 2 (L5) role in Bangalore between February and April 2024. With 3.2 years of experience as an SDE 2 at a product-based MNC, I was eager for this new challenge. This is my detailed interview experience.

Application and Initial Contact

An Amazon recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn, and after I shared my resume, I received an online assessment link within a week. This was followed by four interview rounds over the next two months.

Online Assessment

The online assessment consisted of two coding questions:

• Question 1: Return the longest decreasing subsequence in a linked list. (Similar to Longest Increasing Subsequence)
• Question 2: Given two categories of movies with start time and duration, find the minimum time by which you can finish watching at least 1 movie of each category.

Round 1: Low Level Design (1 hr)

This round began with introductions, followed by a couple of leadership principles questions, such as a situation where I had to deep dive into code. The main design question was to design a chat messenger like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger.

Round 2: Coding (1 hr)

Similar to the first round, we started with introductions and leadership principles questions, discussing a situation where I aimed for a long-term goal rather than a short-term one. I was then given two coding questions:

• Question 1: Given a matrix of blue and white balloons, where white balloons surrounding blue ones (4 directions) convert to blue each day. I needed to return the minimum number of days required to convert all balloons to blue. A follow-up asked how to get the number of blue balloons at any given day (0 to MAX_DAY). I approached this using BFS.
• Question 2: This was a design question for an Amazon locker service. I had to design a function to return the locker to be opened when a package is received and another function to retrieve a package for a given customer. Packages were assumed to be small, medium, or large. Due to lack of time, I verbally discussed the algorithm and data structures.

Round 3: Hiring Manager, High Level Design (1 hr)

This round started with introductions, leadership principles questions, and a discussion about my projects. The main question was to design an auto-complete or search recommendations feature for Amazon Search, with the assumption of a given ranking algorithm and the target to show the top 5 searches.

Round 4: Bar Raiser, Coding (1 hr)

This final round began with introductions and leadership principles questions. I was asked two coding questions:

• Question 1: Given a Binary Tree, return the maximum sum of a subset such that no two nodes in any subset are adjacent. I completely solved this question with a dry run.
• Question 2: Print the subset for the previous question. I verbally discussed how to improve the algorithm to print the subset.

Feedback and Result

I received the hire feedback within a week, and compensation details were finalized the following week. I ultimately accepted the offer.