whoami: 3 YoE, working at a startup.

I was reached out by Amazon recruiter for the role of SDE-2 checking if I was interested. After confirmation, an online assesment link was shared.

Online assessment round(Hackerearth):
Q1. It was on the lines of that meeting times were given for a day, i.e. 24 hours. Needed to find number of meeting rooms required. Similar to Meeting rooms-ii.
Q2. Given a list of words, reverse the words whose index is a number in Fibonacci series.
Eg. "Hello How are you"
Reverse words at index 1,1,2,3,5,8 ...

I was able to solve both of them. I was then reached out by the recruiter for virtual-onsite interview scheduling. The overall process took around 2-3 weeks.

LP: Leadership principles

Round 1
LP question: What is the most innovative work you have done?
Coding: Print boundary of a binary tree. Code should cover all corner cases and a dry run is required.

Round 2
LP question: Tell me about a problem when you had to dig deep into technicalities and figure out a solution.
Coding: Merge K Sorted arrays. It was arrays instead of lists here.

Round 3
This was a design round.
LP question: Tell me about things you did apart from your primary responsibility.

Design question: Design a metric publishing system for cloud environments.
Various applications running in the cloud environment should be able to publish some metrics via this systyem. There should also be mechanism for analyzing the metric data at a later point of time. Which all services are required, databases, how will you fetch the metric data at a later point in time? How will different applciation interact with the metric publishing system? (I suggested an SDK based approach. The SDK would encapsulate the exposed REST APIs and provide an layered way for the application to interact with the metric system).

Round 4
LP questions

1. Describe a project where deadlines were stringent. How did you handle it?
2. Describe a task where it seemed impossible. What steps were taken by me?

Coding question: Given a root directory, find all duplicate files in that.
Now this one I had to clarify definition of duplicates, how is the directory structure represented, should I consider this as a n-ary tree with each node being either file or directory. All these were discussed and I then suggested a BFS based approach for navigating the tree. Now, how do I check if two files are duplicate? I suggested adding hash values(md5 sums) into a Hashmap and then comparing them for each traversed file while adding its own hash values in the Hashmap. Code was required.

Round 5 (Bar raiser)
LP questions

1. Describe a time when you took a calculated risk.
2. Describe a time when you took a shortcut.
3. Conflit with manager in any project.
4. Conflict with manager in some feedback.
5. 3 things you are doing to improve yourself.
6. Tell about a time when you convinced someone with your opinion and you were right.

Design question
Design a price automation system.
We need to crawl(or scrape) the competitors website for price comparison of a product and report it for further processing. Eg. Samsung galaxy price on Amazon is 10K, then find price for this product on competitor's website.
Discussions revolved around which all microservices are required, databases, intercation between services for HLD.
For LLD, class designs was written.

Tips:

• Amazon gives good weightage to LP questions. Do prepare them well. Write them down, practice explaining them. Follow STAR approach if possible, it allows us to organize each answer well.
• If SDE-2 position, they have a design round as well. There are many good videos on youtube for this.
• Check out the recently asked questions for Amazon in Leetcode interview questions/experiences and code them.
• Be verbal while coding. Say out loud your thinking and approach. Do live commentary of your coding. This has dual advantage. One, the interviewer can see that you are clear on your approach, and second, if you derail, the interviewer can bring you back on track as quick as possible.

All the best folks!! :)