I wanted to share my interview experience I had recently with Amazon for the SDE-2 position.

Round - 1 [ System-Design]

Design a configuration management system from which various applications will fetch their configs. This system will store the configs for multiple applications. Apps should pull the configs from this system while restarting/deploying. Any changes in the configs of the application should reflect in the application as well.

Rough low level system design for online teaching platform.

Round - 2 [System Design]

Design Instagram.

Round - 3 [Coding]

https://leetcode.com/problems/all-nodes-distance-k-in-binary-tree/- gave dfs approach
https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-without-repeating-characters/ - gave 2 pointer approach

Reviews

I am a bit sad that I got rejected as I had pretty high hopes. Frankly speaking, I feel that this sde-2 interview was a lot easier than the other sde-2 interviews I have read about. I had already practiced all the questions I faced in round 2 and round 3 as they are pretty common. In round 1 I gave an approach and the interviewer looked satisfied (not sure though). with it, we discussed various points about consistency, availability etc. The coding questions I faced are one of the most common medium level problems. I am a bit unhappy that I got stuck for a while in the 2 pointer approach in the strings problem.

I have solved around 150 problems on leetcode. I feel bad because 1. I already had practiced the questions that were asked to me and 2. because these questions are easier than the other sde-2 interviews i have seen.

I am not sure, what amazon is looking for, maybe my answers weren't perfect. My advise would be to not just solve a problem and move on, but also make sure that you are familiar with all the approaches for a particular problem, be it coding or system design. I think you really have to ace all the interviews and not stumble in between to get selected.

Best of Luck