Amazon SDE 2 - Interview Experience | REJECTED !

Day 1

1. Round 1 (LLD) (onsite) Design a playlist from the DJservice and the Recommendation service to mix the songs. Given the list of 10 requirements printed on paper. The core idea is to mix the songs coming from the Djservice and the recommendation service, in a custom proportion or in an equal proportion. Filters can be applied based on the user preferences.

Expectation is to write the production ready classes with proper syntax on paper.

Leadership principles - any situation where you pushed the customer back, have you made anything in thinking long term vision and did you sacrifice any short term goals for that.

2. Round 2 (DSA) (onsite)

Q1 - Given two boxes of A[] , B[] with size n , where each element represents the sweetness, given the M students, distribute the sweetness of A , B to each child and you should minimize the total sweetness.

Q2 - Find the unoccupied seat position with the maximum distance to the occupied site.

seats[] = {'O','U','U','U','O','O'};

Answer - 2nd indexed seat

Leadership principles - outside of your responsibility, any process you have improved by yourself.

I messed up the first round, didn't able to code it properly. And coming to the second round wrote the brute force solution for Q1 and optimal for Q2.

Day 3 (virtual)

Round 3 (DSA) Scheduled another loop interview, virtually. I thought it would be HLD since they had shared a website link similar to Excalidraw, and they also shared the common coding space link.

Prepared for the HLD, but the interviewer asked me 2 DSA questions.

1. Given the 2D array with 2 colours validate if it is a valid chessboard.
2. LCS (longest common subsequence)

I feel lucky for both the DSA questions. Interviewer is asking all the approaches and all the time and space complexities and the expectation is to write the optimal code from scratch.

I wrote the recursive, memoization for 2nd, but interviewer asked for the tabulation as well. For these 2 questions the time limit is 45 mins. We have to explain our approaches before the coding.

Leadership principles -

1. Any features that you implemented which you think customers don’t know they need but are required for customer.
2. How do you approach complex problems and whom you check with and how you solve it.

Interviewer asked for multiple instances for both questions not a single instance.

Right after this round, after 20 mins HR scheduled the final round which is supposed to happen in a week. This final round is with some Engineering Leader from USA.

Round 4 (virtual)

Round 4 with the Senior Eng manager was scheduled on Day 13, but due to network issue I asked HR to reschedule since the interviewer could not hear my voice. HR rescheduled it after 1 week on Day 18.

Interviewer set the expectations and what she would ask in this round. She is from USA.

1. Leadership principles
   • Difference in opinion with the senior
   • Case where I got critical feedback
   • How you validate the AI tool output
   • How you identified AI generated code is wrong and how you rectified it.

I answered mostly in favour of me. For code validation I said I would check all endpoints of the code where there is a touch point. She said that means manual testing.

1. HLD System design Design a YouTube‑like system – Video Storage System.

Functional requirements:

1. Upload video
2. Download video
3. Watch video
4. Search video

I designed it on their website – Bluescape. I included chunking, Elasticsearch, manifest files, post‑processing, Blob storage, CDN, S3 pre‑signed URLs, different video qualities. The interviewer asked how I would scale it, then concluded the interview with about 10 mins left.

So guys what do you think based on the experience, do I have a chance here? I don’t have any hope since I messed up their first round LLD.

Edit – 24 Aug 2026 I sent a follow‑up mail on Saturday last week but haven’t heard back from HR. It’s been more than a week after the final interview. Can I assume it’s negative?

Update As expected, I got the automated rejection mail.