Status: 6 years of experience as a backend engineer
Position: SDE2 at Amazon
Location: Seattle

Preparation: This was my first ever FAANG interview and only prepared for 2 weeks. Solved 30 leetcode medium and hard problems.

OA
Reorder log files (only passed 17/24 test cases)
Top K frequent elements (21/21 test cases passed)

Recruiter reached out next day and setup onsite.

Virtual Onsite:
Note: The problems I got were not from Leetcode but were loosely based on some common LC problems.

Round1: Full of LP questions. Think this round went well.

Round 2: LP questions for 30 mins. Coding question was a variant of this https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-substring-without-repeating-characters/solution/.

This was by far the worst round I had. Tried approaching the solution in an optimal way but the interviewer kept pushing me to solve it via brute force way first. Had a mind block and froze for a few mins but was able to finish the solution in O(n^3) time complexity. End code had a lot of bugs and the interviewer nudged me to fix all of them which isnt a good sign.

Round 3: 20mins of LP. System Design round: Design an online photo sharing application. This round went really well. My background is in distributed systems so this part seemed easy to me.

Round 4(most likely bar raiser) : 30mins of LP. Coding question was similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/analyze-user-website-visit-pattern/. Solved this question with O(n^3) TP and mentioned possible ways to optimize it. Dont think the interviewer liked my solution and I should have taken more time to come up with an optimal solution.

Round 5: 20mins of LP and a topological sort problem similar to https://leetcode.com/problems/alien-dictionary/. This round went well and I was able to finish the implementation with 10mins to spare.

Got an email couple of days later from my recruiter that I dint get the job.

Key Takeaways:

1. Dont let interviewers push you into solving problems in a brute force way. More often than not, they will expect an optimal solution from you and solving via a brute force way will leave you very little time to optimize.
2. Practice as much as possible. Speed matters a lot in these interviews and you need to be able to come up with optimized solutions and fully functional, bug free code within 20-30 mins.
3. Take a few mins analysing the problem before getting into the code. Try thinking of different approaches before proceding with the solution.
4. External SDE2 hires at Amazon are expected to be better than 50% of the existing SDE2s so you need to perform really well in the interviews to be able to qualify.

Finally, this was my first ever FAANG interview and now I am confident that I will be able to crack one of these sooner or later. Just need to keep practicing and come up with optimal solutions. My coding speed needs to improve a lot as well.