Current total exp - 6.5 yrs

Phone Screen(1 hour)

• Problem: Partition to K Equal Sum Subsets (LC Hard).
• Gave sorting in asc order then using two pointer approach. We both were not able to find where it will fail, but we knew it will fail :-)
• Final approach: Backtracking with recursion, just told the skeleton and explained due to time constraints
• Discussion around pruning and optimization.

Then recruiter scheduled four loop rounds, one was system design and other three DSA.

DSA round 1:

• LP1: Tell a time where you broke production system or you were on call while it broke, what steps you take and how did you resolve ?
• LP2: Tell a time where you lead/develop a technical project. How did you proceed about the same ? what was the success metric for project
• Problem 1: Find min element in rotated sorted array
• Problem 2: https://leetcode.com/problems/132-pattern/description/

Was able to answer first three correctly, but only discussed approach for the third one and implemented the O(n^2 logn) approach.
LP took around 15 mins of total one hour

DSA Round 2:

• LP1: Tell me a time where you took lead and saw some issues and resolve them ?
• LP2: Tell me a time where you faced tight deadlines and how do you ensure that those are met
• Problem 1: Flight connectivity problem(Given flights from city a to B and source/dest is given) → check if destination reachable.
  -> Solved using graph + BFS/DFS.
  -> Follow-up: flights with departure/arrival times, requiring path validation with time constraints.

Was able to code answer first three, for third there were bugs in the code but approach discussed was fine.

DSA Round 3:

• LP1: When did you solve a complex problem with simple solution
• LP2: Time when you disagreed with you rmanager and commit
• Design question: EC2 instance discount system.
  -> Implemented using Strategy Pattern with multiple discount types.
  -> Focus on clean OOP design and extensibility.

Was able to answer all three correctly(afaik)

System Design:

• Design “People who bought this also bought that” recommendation system.
• Used order history to compute product associations.
• Architecture: Order events → aggregation → recommendation store → API.
• Discussed precomputation, caching, and scalable storage (NoSQL/Elastic).

-> This is the round where I think I screwed up big time, was nervous and did not understood/discussed the problem in depth and jumped straight to FR/NFR.
-> And when I tried to satisfy my FR I was fumbling, didn't had the clear path what I need to implement.
-> At end interviewer also gave hints which I was not able to use correctly.

After following up with recruiter for 2 weeks, got the rejection mail. It specifically mentioned that its is policy of amazon that they don't provide individual feedback. IDK when the policy changed coz for the last three times I got rejected I every time I got the feedback from recruiter itself.

You can find my hat-trick of amazon rejections here: https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/2491633/amazon-sde-2-bangalore-july-2022-rejecte-gvgn/

Not at all sad, just saying !

Hope this helps !
Cheers !!