Amazon SDE2 Interview
Summary
I interviewed for an SDE2 position at Amazon, navigating through an Online Assessment, DSA, System Design, and Bar Raiser rounds. Despite strong performance in several areas, particularly DSA, I was ultimately rejected due to challenges in the Low-Level Design discussions.
Full Experience
My interview journey for the SDE2 role at Amazon involved several rigorous rounds. It started with an Online Assessment, where I successfully solved two coding questions: one LeetCode Medium and one LeetCode Hard, completing both within the time limit.
Round 1: Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA)
In this round, I was given two problems. The first was similar to Find Peak Element, which I approached with a binary search strategy. The second was Find Median from Data Stream, for which I proposed and discussed a heap-based approach. I solved both on paper and handled follow-up questions related to Heap Data Structures effectively. This round received positive feedback.
Round 2: Hiring Manager Discussion + LRU & LFU Design
This round began with a 20-30 minute discussion about my previous work experience. Following that, I was tasked with a coding challenge where I designed and implemented an LRU Cache on paper. Due to time constraints, we only had time to discuss the LFU Cache concept without full implementation. I also received positive feedback for this round.
Round 3: High-Level Design (HLD) + Low-Level Design (LLD)
The problem presented was designing a Contact Support feature for an e-commerce website. While I felt I performed well in the HLD discussion, the LLD discussion consumed most of the time, preventing me from completing the class and interface design thoroughly. Unfortunately, this round resulted in negative feedback.
Round 4: Bar Raiser + LLD
This round focused heavily on Amazon's Leadership Principles, where I answered 7-8 behavioral questions. For the system design task, I worked on a Rate Limiter problem for about 40 minutes, managing to implement two algorithms in the remaining 10-15 minutes. Although the interviewer seemed positive, the feedback for this round was surprisingly negative.
Ultimately, despite my strong performance in several rounds, particularly the DSA and initial design rounds, the LLD sections significantly impacted my overall result, leading to a rejection. I'm still unclear about the negative feedback from Round 4, as I felt quite confident. This experience reaffirms that rejections are not failures but stepping stones, and every interview is a valuable learning opportunity.
Interview Questions (7)
Design the Contact Support feature for an e-commerce website. This involves considering user communication channels, backend ticket management, agent assignment, notification systems, and scalability.
Design a distributed Rate Limiter to control the rate at which users or services can access an API. This involves discussing various algorithms like Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, and considerations for scale, consistency, and fault tolerance.
Answered 7-8 behavioral questions based on Amazon's Leadership Principles, covering situations related to ownership, customer obsession, dive deep, bias for action, etc.