Status: Non CS degrees, MSc in Engineering in US
Position: Backend Software Engineer for 2 years in startup

Background
Since the pandemic, I have spent a lot of time on Leetcode. I have solved almost 1000 problems and some of them more than once.

A couple of recruiters had reached out about interviewing for SD2 roles on AWS and once I felt ready, I started the process. Immediately got inviation OA.

Online Assessment
Typical OA test, 2 problems, weird thing was that both of them were similar. One graph traversal given an adjacency list and one given an adjacency matrix. Nothing special here, Amazon likes graph questions and questions can be found in the list.

Recruiter came back after 2 days and asked to schedule interview. It was scheduled quite fast, for 3 weeks later (I wanted earlier but there was no availability).

Onsite
Typical amazon onsite consisting of 4 rounds. In each round 2 LPs are examined by interviewers on a 30 min conversation. In my case, the conversation every time ended up being heavily technical and not just a story telling. I appreciated that the interviewers dived deep in my responses and asked accurate follow up questions. My advice here, pick stories that not only show how you have demostrated an LP in your work but that also demonstrate specific technical competencies. Mention specific tech stacks, libraries or tools used, dont be generic.

Round 1
Object Oriented Design Question. Interviewer knew C++ so it was a good exercise and we dived deep into polymorphism, inheritance and templates.

Round 2
Coding question similar to Word Break 2, was asked to dry run the code and explain runtime.

Round 3
System design round. Design an elevator system

Round 4
2 coding questions. First one was similar to Concetaned Words, second was a similar string backtracking problem but with many requirements. Solved the first one and almost finished the code for the second one - no time to dry run it.

4 days later I received the call from recruiter that the feedback was positive and that I would get an SDE2 offer. Overall it was a very challenging experience, felt that interviewers were looking for correct and functioning code.