I wanted to share my full loop experience for Amazon SDE3/L6 role. Overall, the loop was intense and went on for 2 months. Here's the breakdown of each round:

Phone Screen (DSA Focus)

• Problem: Find the maximum total bitrate required by a video streaming service over time. I used a Line Sweep algorithm with a difference array approach.
• Follow-up: Discussed strategies to handle large input files efficiently.
• Leadership Principles (LPs): Focused on a project where I had to dive deep into technical data, propose solutions, and influence decisions. Got a lot of follow-ups on alternate approaches and what I could have done differently.

Round 1: Low-Level Design

• Topic: Design a monitoring and alert generation system based on metric streams.
• Focus Areas: System extensibility, clean abstractions, and alert thresholds.
• LPs: Insist on Highest Standards — discussion around setting quality benchmarks in large-scale React migrations.

Round 2: High-Level Design

• Topic: Hotel Booking System — end-to-end design for search and booking flows.
• Expectations: Scalability, DB design, eventual consistency, and system evolution.
• LPs: Dealing with ambiguity, long-term thinking.

Round 3: DSA + Coding
Problems:

• Task Scheduler
• Bus Routes
• LPs: Deliver Results — strong emphasis on impact and reliability.

Round 4: Hiring Manager Round

• Deep dive into past projects involving conflict management, mentorship, and delivering large-scale features.
• Behavioral sections covered how I proposed initiatives that were initially rejected but eventually adopted.

Round 5: Bar Raiser

• Focused on innovation, design leadership, and proactive debugging.
• Wanted detailed, structured examples of technical ownership and measurable impact.

Offer

• Base: 85LPA
• First Year Sign-on: ~50LPA
• Second Year Sign-on: ~40LPA
• RSUs: ~600 units (Back Loaded, Y1-5%, Y2-15%, Y3-40%, Y4-40%)

Final Thoughts:

• Amazon interview loop is as much about system design and DSA as it is about how you demonstrate ownership and decision-making (LPs) through your past work.
• Be ready for follow-up questions, they really dig into "why" and "how" behind each decision.
• Most of the interviews went well beyond 60 minutes especially the HM round.
• Rejected the offer

YoE: 11 Years
Current TC: ~1.2Cr PA