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Summary
I was rejected for the System Development Engineer role at Amazon after 2 years of experience. Despite a strong performance in the system design round, my inability to complete a coding question (Generate Parentheses) led to the rejection.
Full Experience
Amazon System Development Engineer (SysDE) Interview Experience
Company: Amazon
Role: System Development Engineer (SysDE)
Experience: 2 Years
Status: Rejected
Timeline: March 2025
📩 How It Started
I was contacted by an Amazon HR on LinkedIn for the System Development Engineer role. With 2 years of experience in full-stack development (React, .NET Core, MySQL, Elasticsearch), I was excited to explore this opportunity.
📍 Timeline Overview
- Early March: Online Assessment (OA)
- Mid March (Week 3): Two Technical Rounds (Back-to-back)
🧪 Online Assessment (OA)
Standard OA questions – mainly string-based. Completed in the first week of March.
🧠 Round 1 (Actually happened second) – Coding + LPs
Format: 1-hour virtual interview
Interviewers: Two (one shadowing)
Structure:
- First 10–15 mins: Leadership Principles discussion
- Next: Two coding questions
Questions:
- Similar to: Generate Parentheses
I struggled with recursion and couldn’t complete it. - Add Two Numbers
Solved this.
🧠 Round 2 (Actually happened first) – System Design + LPs
Format: 1-hour virtual interview
Interviewers: Two (one shadowing)
Topic: High-Level Design (HLD) of an E-commerce System
What I Covered:
- Explained CDN, ALB, NGINX, API Gateway, Microservices
- Core Services: Auth, Product, Cart, Payment, Order, Notification
- Queues: For async communication (e.g., order → notification)
- Caching: Memcached with consistent hashing
- DB: SQL with master-master and multiple read replicas
- Circuit Breaker: Design for fault isolation
Follow-up Questions:
- SLA and SLO
- Business and App metrics
- How to handle large traffic or a single service failure (Circuit Breaker)
- Caching strategies and eviction policies
- Horizontal vs Vertical Scaling
- SQL vs NoSQL (used SQL for orders/payments; NoSQL for product catalog)
Discussion on Leadership Principles (LPs)
Outcome: Went well. I was confident and clear.
❌ Final Verdict: Rejected
Even though the system design round went well, the coding round performance was not up to the mark.
Takeaway for me: Should focus on DSA.
Interview Questions (3)
High-Level Design (HLD) of an E-commerce System, covering components like CDN, ALB, NGINX, API Gateway, Microservices (Auth, Product, Cart, Payment, Order, Notification), Queues for async communication, Caching (Memcached with consistent hashing), DB (SQL with master-master and multiple read replicas), and Circuit Breaker for fault isolation. Follow-up questions included SLA and SLO, business and app metrics, handling large traffic or single service failure, caching strategies and eviction policies, horizontal vs vertical scaling, and the choice between SQL vs NoSQL.