[Offer] Amazon India | SDE-2 Loop → Offered SDE-1 | Interview Experience + Strategy

Background

• Experience: 2.5 years as a SDE
• Education: Tier-3 college

🧠 Online Assessment

I got an invite for SDE-2 OA, and was able to solve 15/15 test cases on both questions. I can't share the exact problems (NDA), but the patterns were around:

• Prefix + Suffix handling
• Sliding window with maps and constraints

Then workstyle simulation and more sections for SDE2. I received a call within a few days for onsite in office (offline) rounds at the Amazon office in Bangalore, 2 rounds same day and if I cleared any one of them then the HM round same day. I had roughly 3 weeks to prepare.

🧪 Interview Rounds

📍 Round 1: DSA (Onsite)

Questions (similar):

• Longest Common Subsequence
• Longest Palindromic Substring
• Zigzag Level Order Traversal of Binary Tree

🔍 My approach: I started with recursion, moved to memoization, and then converted to bottom-up DP for LCS and palindrome problems. I solved and coded them on paper. No laptop was given to code.

No LPs were asked in this round.

Verdict: Inclined

✅ I felt good about this one — interviewer was engaged, gave a thumbs-up when I optimized LCS properly. One big advantage of offline interviews.

📍 Round 2: LLD + LP

Design Task: IRCTC Booking System (Railway Reservation System)

Not trivial. Time was limited. I couldn’t complete the entire flow but broke it down:

• I showed how I would model trains, stations, routes
• I focused on core booking module and conditions

I wrote high-level class structure + some pseudocode

🎙️ LPs: I can’t recall exactly, but there were 2–3 light behavioral questions. Focus was more on LLD.

💬 Interviewer said: "You prioritized the right module and communicated clearly, that’s what we wanted."
Verdict: Inclined

📍 Round 3: HLD + Hiring Manager

🚨 This was the toughest round for me.

📌 LPs First:

• I faced deep LP questions focused on failure handling, technical ownership, and customer impact.
• I struggled here — I wasn’t able to articulate some challenges well as interviewer was looking for more and more technical challanges and he was not able to relate tried my best to explain him but was not impressed

🛠️ Design Question: Twitter with some custom requirements

I was expecting caching, pub-sub etc., but midway I froze. I couldn’t cover scaling properly.
😞 I knew I fumbled this one. But recruiter told that they would take BR round.
Verdict: Not Inclined

📍 Round 4: Bar Raiser (After ~20 days!)

🎙️ LPs first:

• Initially nervous, but I managed to answer convincingly once I got into the groove.
• I focused on Ownership, Dive Deep, and Invent & Simplify.
• Interviewer nodded and asked meaningful follow-ups, which helped ease nerves.

DSA
Find Max Path Sum in Binary Tree (including negative values)
Follow-up: Print the path as well

Thankfully I’d solved this exact pattern in practice a week earlier! I used recursion + backtracking + tracking global max.

🎯 I had a great discussion with the interviewer. I felt really positive leaving this round.

Verdict: Inclined ✅

📬 Final Outcome

I was told that overall feedback was good, but I would be offered SDE-1, not SDE-2.

💸 Compensation:
Detailed post https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6657596/amazon-india-sde-1-25-yoe-tier-3-college-3hqv/