YOE: 5

Hi Guys,
I have been using this awesome forum from quite some time, now its my turn to give back to the community.

Recently, I appeared for SDE 2 position for Amazon. So would like to share my experience here.

Qualifying round:
It was an online assessment round having two problems to solve.

1. It was problem similar to finding no of islands ie 0 sorrounding by 1s in a matrix.
2. Log reorder problem.

Solved both of them in half of the alloted time, with all tested cases passed.

Recruiter contacted me for next set of steps, discussed my industry background with me.
I felt this discussion too, kind of plays an important role in hiring decision.

My onsite was scheduled 15-20 days post my discussion with recruiter.
It was 4 onsite virtual rounds of 1 hour each, back to back with 10mins of break in between.

Round 1:
Interviewer started with introduction, and then questions based on LP were asked
straight for 30mins. Many follow up questions based on my answers too.
Then it was a system design problem similar to design media sharing platform..

It was quite engaging discussion, did well on part of LP problems, though i almost answered all questions posed during design, but there were certain areas i wanted to touch[ were more important I later felt] which I couldn't because of time limit..

Round 2:
Started with LP questions, which went on for 30mins.
for next 30 mins, 1 DS & ALGO [involving strings concept ]problem was asked..
Had not seen that problem before, but could solve it within time.
Due to network issue, the shared codepad wasnt working towards end,
somehow managed to complete code, Wasn't sure if interviewer was satisfied , he wasn't able to ask follow up questions on it, because of network problems.

• Round 3
  Again pattern was same 30 mins LP, followed by 30 mins of problem solving.
  Was asked to implement find command of linux.
  I was able to come up with solution and coded with in 15mins, rest of time many follow up questions were asked, Implemented all of those, enjoyed it throughly, interviewer was quite jolly in nature. I felt he was quite happy with my answers.
  Post this round I felt quite confident.

Round 4
Lot of LP questions + problem
Problem was variant of topological sort.
I came up with DFS solution and started coding it, in middle of code, interviewer asked me to
think of more optimal approach, and dropped in a hint. I built upon it and was able to come up with better solution, he asked me to code it. Could write 80% of code, as time was over.
Interviewer seemed happy and said, its ok, you were almost there.

Overall interview experience was positive, was little skeptical of system design round as I knew I could have done much better than that.
I particularly felt happy about LP part of rounds. Was asked about 20 questions in total, wasn't expecting such huge variety of questions.
LP forms quite major chunk of amazon interview, they very much focus on it.
I would recommend to prepare beforehand all the leadership principles with atleast 2 examples from your past experiences.

I thought I did well in LP and problem solving, was little skeptical about system design. Though amazon bar is quite high, somewhere inside was hoping for an offer. But you never know, whats inside recruiter mind.

Overall it was amazing experience, will continue to work upon my tech skills, hoping to get an offer someday!!