Amazon | SDE2 | Bangalore | April 2021 [Reject]
Anonymous User
3914

Status: BTech Tier 1 CSE
Position: 3.5 yrs experience (2yrs service based + 1.5 yrs product based MNC)

Hiring manager reached out to me on LinkedIn(Feb last week), we had an initial discussion for about 30 mins about my experience and job role. After that, recruiter reached out to me and scheduled a phone screen after 2 weeks. All the interviews were taken by Seattle team.

Round 1 (Phone screen)
Started with brief intro(5 mins) about interviewer.
Problem solving question, question was already there in the codelink shared by the interviewer. He explained the problem again with sample testcase. It was a simple one which can be related to Maven, where we have dependencies on one another.
Ex : There are some packages(A,B,C,D). A is dependent on B,C -- this means B and C should be installed before A. Question is we will be given package list with dependencies, we need to install all the packages in correct order.
Gave a simple DFS approach and keep track of visited(installed) ones, he was satisfied and asked me to code. Completed the code within 5-10 mins. Then he asked a follow up where we might have a circular dependency(cycle), discussed the approach with him, he was satisfied and asked me to code. Wrote the code, he told logic is wrong and will fail for one case, he gave the case where it is failing, corrected it and we dry ran to verify the logic.
We still had 25 mins left after the question, so he asked how can we construct a graph for the above question and other questions related to improving the code in terms of readability, exception handling etc. This was more like a discussion.

HR reached out to me after 2 days that I have cleared phone screen and asked me to give dates for virtual ONSITE. I have scheduled it after 3 weeks. There were total 4 rounds split into 2 days(2+2).

Round 1 (SDE3, System Design)
Started with brief intro(5 mins) about ourselves. Then, he jumped into LP's(30 mins). In some cases, he asked follow up on the answers I have told.
System design, design a live video broadcast platform. I started with Requirements gathering(functional & non functional), then discussed various API's and services involved. Then moved on to scaling the system(load balancers, caching, sharding etc). Since, the time was low(only 25 mins), we only discussed at high level components, didn't discuss in depth on any service. It was more like an interaction and discussing trade off's. Interviewer was good during interaction, overall good experience. Didn't have time for asking him questions.

Round 2 (HM, Problem solving)
There were 2 interviewers(India HM and Seattle HM), India HM was just shadowing and didn't ask any questions. Started with intro, he asked in detail about what I do at current company(10 mins). Again, jumped into LP's(25 mins).
Then we moved to problem solving, it was a simple n-ary tree problem but it was not direct, the problem statement was very vague. I asked him multiple questions to finally reach the problem. It was like there is a root of n-ary tree and we need to find distance between any 2 given nodes in the tree. There is also a distance given from root to each node(weighted edges). This should be done in O(1) time. I told we can precompute the values and store it in a map, then he asked about precompute step. I told how we can precompute but missed one case which I found when I dry run my logic, told the same to interviewer about failure case. He asked to correct it and write the code. He was more focused on the approach, data structure I use than coding. This went well and we had 5 mins left for asking questions.

Round 3 (Bar raiser, Problem solving)
This started 5 mins late as the interviewer was having connection issues. He told he will switch ON video only during intro and at the end while asking questions. Started with brief intro about both(5 mins), then he jumped into LP's(25 mins). This was very difficult since there was no video and he was grilling me real hard on this, so many follow ups and in one question, we went on to dicuss at API level.
Then he asked a problem solving question, it was a graph problem but the problem statement was vague and he had to give mutiple examples to make me understand the problem(almost took 10 mins time, since it is virtual he had to draw on a whiteboard to explain the structure of the graph). This felt weird as he was only interested in coding the solution, I told my approach first but he just told to code the solution(WTF in 10 mins without knowing if approach is correct or not). I was able to write only pseudo code, this was not so great and I think one of the red flags.

Round 4 (SDE3, Object Oriented Design)
Started with brief intro(5 mins) about ourselves. Then, he jumped into LP's(20 mins).
OOD question, design a parking lot. Expectation was writing clean readable code using OOD principles.
I clarified all the requirements and started coding. Discussed in detail about each and every class(Why this or why not other ways). Overall this was decent, but I think interviewer was expecting me to discuss more about design patterns and using them in my code.

VERDICT (REJECT)
Recruiter came back after 3 days with a rejection mail. Feedback was, I was very good at behavioural part(LP's), system design was decent and was able to reach the BAR but my coding skills was not up to the mark which was raised by all interviewers.

TAKEAWAYS/SUGGESTIONS
This was my first interview after 2 years and also first time with FAANG, my preparation was decent(Leetcode ~200 problems), for system design(donne martin primer, youtube videos). But I didn't prepare much on LLD and Lp's. They focus really a lot on LP's and if we try to make up something, we will be easily caught during follow up questions, please avoid this and dedicate a proper time to LP's. This also helps in finishing LP part of the interview fast and you will have more time to technical section. Also, suggest giving interviews at smaller companies before giving at large ones, so that you will have interview practice as well.
Finally big thanks to LC community and hope the same good work continues.

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