Amazon | SDE2 | Bangalore | Nov 2019 [Reject]

My analysis is this.

I almost did well more or less in coding rounds and solved all coding related questions(may not be most optimized though).

Where I feel I didn't perform well is in design rounds.
Yes I read about lots of design problems prior and also watched lots of youtube videos but in our day to day work in office (atleast in my case), I have never designed a complete distributed/scalable system myself as mostly we work on small features/enhancement to the existing well established product.

Key takeaways from this experience is this.

  1. Do not underestimate the content in your resume.
  2. Fundamentails of data structures must be cleared- solve lots of medium questions on leetcode and cover breadth of all the fundamental algorithms and data structures- this helped in solving coding questions.
  3. Amazon focuses a lot on behavioural questions - I dont know why they consider everybody to have experiece on all amazon principles- https://www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/principles
  4. Best of luck on design round. Only more knowledge/reading around distributed and scalabale systems and little experience may help here.
  5. If first telephonic round is cleared , they take 5 rounds for sure no matter how you perform in each round. I mean next round is not dependent on how you performed in previous round.
  6. Yes they take 6,7 rounds for almost everybody(In india atleast)
  7. . Keep at it, It is just a matter of time.

Round 1 - Online Coding challenge

  1. Sort Sentences based on some common string in it like a date(Not exactly this but almost same)
    ans: Solved all test cases
  2. Find minimum cost in a matrix from top left to some cell with a particular value
    ans: Tried backtracking. solved almost 60% of test cases

Round 2 - Telephonic Desing Interview

  1. Design a parking lot system
    ans: Tried template methd design pattern

  2. In depth explanation of projects in a resume

Round 3 - Onsite (Design)

  1. Desing a system to store massive data in forms of key-value pair
    ans: I did not know about Amazons Dynamo db

  2. Design a flight booking system

Round 4 - Coding

  1. Find missing element in array in O(n) time
  2. Find longest palindrome substring in a string
  3. Find if a particular element exist in array of size m with atmost m+1 comparisons.
    ans: Could not found a good solution during interview but after interview clicked.

Round 5

  1. Multiple Behavioural quesions based of amazon leadership principles - Best of luck
  2. Given a graph, check if it is a tree

Round 6

  1. In depth questions based on resume
  2. Desing a URl shortner service
    ans: availbale on grokking a system design interview

Round 7

  1. Print binary tree in a zigzag fashion(Question was not straight forward though)
    ans: solved with two stacks
  2. Given a number pad and its alphabets(like old phones keypad). Given a sequence of numbers , find all possible strings that can be formed.
    ans: Tried with backtracking
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