Status: Member Technical Staff in a product Based company, Chennai
Position: SDE2 at Amazon
Location: Chennai
Date: Nov 2021

I got an offer for SDE-2 at Amazon on my second attempt.

My first attempt was in April. I started leetcoding and Applied for the position of SDE-2 on the job portal. Contacted by a recruiter and attended online assessment and failed. Of the two questions only half of the cases passed. Recruiter informed me that I will be under a cooldown period of 6 months after which I can interview again.

During this time many recruiters from Amazon contacted me via LinkedIn. I told them that I'm under a cooling period and would contact them back once it is over. Meanwhile after 6 months of preparation I Interviewed for Oracle (Offer), Google (Reject). At this point of time I had solved 850+ problems in leetcode and was able to solve 2 medium and 1 easy under 30 minutes during weekly contests. Once my cooling period is over I contacted back one of the recruiters and applied for the SDE-2 position.

Online Assessment :

My First attempt at Online Assessment contained only coding questions and leadership principles. This time there was another section Workstyle Simulation which involves System Design Simulation.

The online assessment contained 4 parts.

Coding Challenge - 90 mins
Two LC-Medium difficulty problems. Solved both of them under 20 minutes with O(N) time & O(1) space. One was related to coin flips and another was related to sorting.

Work Simulation - 15 mins
This one involves system design decisions we will be making while on work. Simulated Emails and messages from co-workers.

SDE work Style Survey - 7 mins
The leadership principles survey where we will be given situations and to choose what is the right option that we believe.

Amazon Work Style Survey - 8 mins
Given a set of options have to choose the options that resembles me the most.

Recruiter contacted me back and informed me that they are scheduling 3 rounds of Onsite Interview and If it goes well they would schedule another round (Bar Raiser).

Onsite Interview :

Round 1 : Coding

First 10 minutes were focussed towards the LP's.
Question asked : Tell me about a time when you had to learn something new ?

After that Two LC-Hard questions were asked. Both of them are in Leetcode. one is related to sorting and another is related to a knapsack problem. Solved them both within time.

Round 2 : System Design

Was given a system to design. Asked to provide High Level Design at first. After the high level Design is done, I was asked to design a Low Level Design for one of the parts. As I come from the front-end .I didn't do this round completely well. But was able to get to a decent solution.

Round 3 : Managerial Round

Standard LP questions were asked.
I had already prepared well using the STAR framework for these questions.

Recruiter contacted me and informed me that they are scheduling the final round which would also be a managerial round. (I assume this was the bar-raiser).

Round 4 : Bar-raiser

Standard LP questions were asked.
After this there was an LC-Hard question given related to binary tree. Solved this within 15 minutes.

Next day Recruiter contacted me and informed me that I have been selected for SDE-2, Amazon.

Amazon gives more importance to LP’s. Every interview has at least one LP question. So be prepared for this using the STAR framework.

You can read the complete interview preparation here[https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-experience/1588524/Oracle(Offer)-or-Google-(Reject)-or-Amazon-(Offer)].

Compensation Details : https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/1588451/Amazon-or-SDE2-or-Chennai