Amazon || SDE2 || Rejected

I have over 3 years of experience at a product-based MNC and recently appeared for an SDE 2 role at Amazon. There were a total of two interview rounds, both conducted on a Saturday.

The process started with an OA round, which included two easy-to-medium LeetCode coding questions and numerous LP-based MCQ questions.

My first round began with introductions and project discussions, followed by leadership principle questions. I struggled while answering some of these. The interviewer mentioned there would be two coding questions, one medium and another medium-hard level. For the first question, All Nodes Distance K in Binary Tree, I initially proposed O(V+E) time and various space solutions (O(N), O(E), O(h)). However, the interviewer insisted on an O(1) space solution. Despite hints, I couldn't crack it. Consequently, the second question was not asked because I couldn't provide the most optimized solution for the first.

The second round's interviewer seemed unprepared. It also started with introductions and project discussions. About 30 minutes were dedicated to leadership questions, which included prompts like: 'Any challenging project?', 'A time when I learned new things and implemented them in a project,' and 'When I went beyond my scope of work.' Following this, I was asked an easy coding question: Top K Frequent Words. I first provided a brute-force solution and then optimized it to the most efficient one. At the end, I asked a few questions about the interviewer's work in Amazon Payments.

Overall, my first round was not good, both on LP and the coding question, but my second round went well. I didn't ask for feedback, as I felt the first round's performance likely sealed my fate. I hope this experience helps others.