-
Status: SDE2 at Mid-sized Tech
-
Experience: 4 Years
-
Position: SDE2 (L5) at Amazon
-
Date: February 2026
Online Assessment (OA)
Two coding questions + Work Style Simulation.
-
Question 1: Variation of Merge Intervals.
-
Question 2: Graph/Dijkstra based.
-
Simulation: Focus heavily on Ownership and Bias for Action. Don't just pick the "safe" answer; pick the one that delivers for the customer.
Virtual Onsite (4 Rounds)
Round 1: Data Structures & Algorithms
-
Leadership Principles (LP): Customer Obsession and Ownership.
-
Technical: LeetCode 1094 (Car Pooling) variant.
-
Details: After solving with a
TreeMap(), the interviewer pushed for an solution using a difference array. We then discussed how to scale this if the "trips" data was stored in a distributed DB.
Round 2: System Design (HLD)
-
LP: Learn and Be Curious and Dive Deep.
-
Technical: Design a Real-Time Error Log Monitoring System.
-
Details:
-
Requirements: Handle 1M+ writes/sec, sub-second alerting.
-
Architecture: Used Kafka for the ingestion layer, Flink for windowed aggregation, and Elasticsearch for querying.
-
Deep Dive: We spent 15 minutes on backpressure—what happens when the consumer can't keep up with the log spikes?
-
Round 3: Object-Oriented Design (LLD)
-
LP: Bias for Action and Disagree and Commit.
-
Technical: Design a Vending Machine Leasing System.
-
Details: Focused on the relationship between
VendingMachine,LeaseAgreement, andPaymentStrategy. -
Key: Used the State Pattern to handle machine conditions (Idle, Out of Stock, Maintenance). The interviewer looked for clean interfaces and extensibility.
Round 4: The Bar Raiser
-
LP: Insist on the Highest Standards and Deliver Results.
-
Technical: Distributed Rate Limiter.
-
Details: * Started with the Token Bucket algorithm logic.
-
Moved into the implementation: How to handle concurrency using Redis Lua scripts to ensure atomicity.
-
The LP part was intense; they kept asking for specific data points and metrics for every "Result" I mentioned.
-
Result: Offer.
