SDE-2 Offer at Amazon

Hi, sharing my interview experience at Amazon. Thanks to the leetcoders, whose interview experiences helped me clearing the interview.

I was already serving notice, when I first got call from Amazon HR. I had given OA long time back almost 2-2.5 months back. I was working as a lead engineer on my previous company, right from start I was working from scratch. So I worked on several domains such as Fullstack - Python/Django, Data - Python/ML, Devops - Kubernetes/Docker/Terraform, Cloud - AWS/Azure, Databases - Influxdb/Elasticsearch/Prometheus/Dynamodb/Redis/SQL/etc and others. I was fortunate to always work on production systems. Hence, I think my work experience played very important role in getting me offer.

The rounds were:

1. LLD -> Splitwise design and focus on Currency conversion. OA -

• tell me when you interacted with user regarding feedback?
• how do you keep yourself updated?
• Feedback was not good - For lld specific, hr mentioned bar not reached for sde2 because of not solving the currency conversion part fully.
• Based on questions I had created Functional and NF requirements. Started with class diagram and the relations.

2. DSA - conducted on same day with LLD. OA -

• interacted with user regarding feedback?
• any thing you worked out on your own
• DSA - House robber, given island of 0's and 1's count min 0's that could be converted to 1's such that in last only 2 islands were left.
• Feedback - was not 100% from myside, as missed few edge cases.

3. HLD - scheduled 2 weeks after first two rounds. I thought i won't clear, but suprisingly did, but it was decisive round due to bad performance in LLD round. OA -

• tell me about the time when you had to deliver something in tight deadline
• about time, when the ask you thought was not possible
• obstacles in work
• HLD - reviews and ratings section of e-commerce product page. My approach was to create - F and NF requirements, basic entities and the apis. Then simple solution based on F requirements and last part was deep dive based on non F requirements.
• Feedback - best according to me. Poured all LP's which largely covered my work experience.

4. Bar raiser - since my joining date in new company was just 1 week later. I urged hr to schedule my last round and give result on Friday itself. And she mentioned lld would be asked as it was below par. I was earlier preparing on and off, however for 3 days basically I covered all famous problem again and commonly asked problem in amazon. 1 Hour before interview, she mentioned that it will be DSA as per the panel the bar raiser was always problem solving, but good thing being she told which LP's will be asked. Saw few DSA concepts commonly asked in bar raiser. OA -

• Tell me the time when you took ownership
• Tell me the time when you had insisted on high standards
• DSA - Didn't expected this, probably panel knew i was asked to prepare for lld before and got to know about dsa round in last hour only. Sum of numbers in a single linked list. And, scenario for negative numbers (which i was again not able to solve completely). He mentioned to solve without creating any list or string.
• Feedback - Again, strong LP. And DSA was also ok.

Same day, to my surprise got offer. HR mentioned that, my Hiring manager who took HLD round insisted for hire. Definitely, my previous work exp helped a lot in giving strong response to LPs, and since I was an immediate joiner as well, so maybe that could have been the case as well. So, definitely if technical is not good in one round, we can cover based on LP and performing good in other rounds.

I followed leetcode, hellointerview for hld, designgurus for both hld/lld and chatgpt and one most important thing. I always felt and believed that I have the offer from Amazon, and had those affirmations consistently everyday for past 4 weeks, since the first time when I got call regarding interviews, you can buy this - https://www.amazon.in/Scientific-Healing-Affirmations-Practice-Concentration/dp/087612144X.

[Edit] Updated comp link here - https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6735188/sde-2-offer-at-amazon-by-anonymous_user-h8ne/

Keep coding!!

Hare Krishna