Amazon SDE-2 all rounds interview experience [REJECT]
Anonymous User
6539

I recently appeared for Amazon SDE-2 interview and was rejected in the Bar raiser round. While Amazon might not has the best work culture, it's interviews do prepare you to clear other companies'.
Despite the rejection, the Leadership Principles and Design round prep helped me clear other companies.
HR had approached me on Linkedin.
YOE: 5.9 years
Location: Amazon Bangalore

Round 0 (Online Assesment)

Two questions on a hackerrank test:

  1. An easy/medium level treeMap question. Fully solved.
  2. A medium/hard question, in which my 60% test cases passed.

Round 1 (DSA)

First 30 minutes on Leadership principles.
A string pattern matching, similar to this leetcode Hard problem.
https://leetcode.com/problems/longest-happy-prefix/description

I gave two approaches, though both weren't the most optimal. The interviewer didn't give any hints. Just asked clarifying questions regarding my code. I had to write running code for this.

Round 2 (LLD)

Design a Restaurant Booking System.
He wanted to know the classes/entities (Table, Booking etc), APIs and database schema.

The interviewer was helpful and provided hints. I had to used Amazon's internal tool called Bluescape for this, instead of excalidraw. Login to Bluescape beforehand, to save issues during interview.

Round 3 (Hiring Manager/HLD)

Design Amazon shopping cart. The focus was handling inventory for multiple booking buying things at same time.

The interviewer wanted a perfect answer directly, instead of iterating and reaching on a solution. So, the first solution must be the perfect one. I bombed the interview big time.

Round 4 (Bar Raiser/ Problem Solving)

In a social group of n people labeled from 0 to n - 1,friendships are being formed over time.
You are given an array logs, where each log entry logs[i] = [timestamp_i, x_i, y_i]
represents that persons x_i and y_i will become friends at time timestamp_i. Each friendship is transitive.
For millions of such datapoint, find the earliest timestamp, at which all people become friends.

I gave a LinkedList/Set with Map approach. But this question would be solved by Disjoint set, and got the rejection.


Best part of the Amazon Loop was that I got detailed feedback after each of my rounds, which helped with my preparations. Most companies don't do that.

Note: In all the above rounds, first 30 minutes were dedicated to Leadership Principles, typically two questions and several followups. So, you'd have only 25/30 minutes for technical stuff, so giving a brute force approach isn't the best way. Go with the most optimal approach as your answer, if you know it.

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