Amazon SDE - II Interview Experience

I had applied to this role about 6 months ago via a referral. I got the OA and I cleared it. The very next day, recuriter reached out to me and told me that I had cleared the OA.

She asked me if I am interested in SysDev role instead of the role which I have applied for. I politely said no, to which she said that she would reach back to me. I waited for 2 days and I did not get any response from her. When I pinged her, she said that we cannot move forward with your profile for SDE - II role, if you are interested in SysDev role, I will schedule the rounds. I again politely said no and moved one.

Now, Fast forward to 5 months, i.e last month, another recruiter reached out to me if I am available for interview next friday. I was confused, and I asked her if I am eligible for this role as the other recruiter said no.

But, she was like, you are eligible, just let me know your availability. I said, I am available and she scheduled 2 rounds - DSA and LLD.

Round 1(DSA): Started with Leadership principles, which went on for 40 minutes. Then he asked me if we can extend the interview by 10 to 15 mins, to which I said yes. Then he asked me a DSA Question. The question was to find the shortest path between two pieces in a chess board with obstacles. A classic BFS problem!!! I gave the BFS approach and he asked me why cant we use DFS. For which, we had a solid discussion around.

The interviewer had a specific implementation in mind. For example, using a set for visited elements instead of using a boolean array.

I quickly understood what he wanted and adapted to that.

Round 2(LLD): Again, started with Leadership principles, which went on for 20 minutes. Then came the LLD question - Design a parking lot.

I gathered the requirements and listed the classes with their behaviour and attributes. I also listed the design patterns to be used.

Then he asked me to implement couple of methods in the design, which I did. Overall, this went well as well.

Round 3(HLD): And again, started with Leadership principles, which went on for half an hour. The HLD question was to Design Leetcode(any online judge). I did not practice HLD a lot. I fumbled in this round, but somehow I managed to complete the design.

Overall, this was an ok round.

Round 4(Bar raiser): Yet again, started with Leadership principles for 20 minutes. Then asked a DSA question - Something like task scheduler where each task has dependencies. He asked me to implement a solution which ensures there is not task starvation - this means I shouldn't be using a queue for visiting the tasks while doing the topological sorting.

He gave me a few clues and I was able to quickly grab those. The solution was to implement topological sorting using DFS.

After a week or so, I got the hire call. Finally after being rejected by google and Microsoft, it was nice to get an offer.