After 2 years and 8 months at an MNC, I recently interviewed for an SDE-2 role at Amazon Dublin. It was a smooth but lengthy process with a heavy focus on Leadership Principles (LPs), and little focus on system design(hld, lld), and DSA. Sharing my experience for those preparing!
Interview Rounds Overview:
🚀 Round 0: 30-Min Call
Discussion about the interview process & expectations.
📝 Round 1: Screening (Eliminatory)
DSA Question: Given a 2D array [n*2] with [timestamp, value], aggregate values per minute. Leetcode medium level
Approach: Used HashMap (discussed alternative approaches like TreeMap, sparse arrays, and tradeoffs).
LP: 3 questions.
🧠 Round 2: 2 LP + DSA
DSA Question: Reorganize String
Solution: Used Priority Queue (Heap) for O(26log 26*n ) ≈ O(n) time complexity. Knew the linear solution but didn’t discuss it, as i was not sure if that's correct.
LP: 2 Leadership Principle questions.
🛠 Round 3: 2 LP + High-Level Design
System Design: Design Tiny URL
Discussion: Scaling, caching, DB design, URL encoding strategies.
LP: 2 questions. this round went well.
📌 Round 4: 8-12 LPs (Full LP Round)
Product Manager from a different team took this round.
All my prepared LP examples got exhausted, so had to dig into my past work for more stories for the next rounds.
💻 Round 5: 2 LP + Low-Level Design + 1 more LP
LLD Question: E-commerce API to fetch products for a category & its subcategories.
Hiccup: Took too long to catch the hint for using Strategy Pattern for filtering.
LP: 3 questions. This round didn't go that well, reason of rejection is this round
🗣 Round 6: Deep Dive LP (3 LPs)
In-depth follow-ups on every story.
Heavy focus on problem-solving in ambiguity.
Key Learnings & Takeaways
🔹 LLD was my weakest round, likely led to rejection. Need to practice more design patterns & trade-offs.
🔹 Each round had ~30 min LP discussion, so be well-prepared with diverse examples.
🔹 Amazon HR provides a list of 3 LPs to ignore, so focus on the relevant ones.
🔹 Shadow interviewer in every round (silent observer taking notes).
🔹 I requested spaced-out rounds instead of Amazon's suggested "one-day blitz" – which helped!
Overall, the process was structured, but long. "Let it go dark enough to see the stars." 🌟 On to the next!
Would love to hear how others prepared for LLD & LP rounds. Any tips?
#Amazon #SDE2 #InterviewExperience #SystemDesign #LeadershipPrinciples
I think i was competing with this guy: https://leetcode.com/discuss/compensation/6389764/Amazon-London-SDE2