Recently interviewed for Amazon SDE2 role. Sharing the interview flow and questions asked.
Interview Process:
- Coding Round
- Managerial / Leadership Principles Round
- Hiring Manager Round (HLD focus)
Main focus areas:
- DSA
- Scalability
- Performance
- Customer Obsession
- Ownership
- STAR format answers
Round 1 — Coding + Project Discussion
Started with:
- Deep dive into projects
- Design decisions
- Tradeoffs
- Ownership-related questions
Coding Question:
Amazon receives transfer notifications whenever money moves between accounts.
Transfers form a chain, for example:
A → B → C → D
Input is provided as pairs:
[A, B]
meaning money moved from A to B.
Task:
Find:
- Initial source account
- Final destination account
Example:
numberOfTransfers = 3
transferList = [
(222, 111),
(111, 333),
(444, 222)
]
Output:
start = 444
end = 333
Explanation:
444 → 222 → 111 → 333
Main concepts:
- Graphs
- HashSet
- In-degree / out-degree style thinking
Round 2 — System Design (HLD)
Design Amazon Locker System
Requirements discussed:
- Delivery driver deposits package
- Customer receives code
- Customer unlocks locker using code
- Locker allocation
- OTP/code validation
- Expiry handling
- Multiple locker sizes
- Scalability
- Availability
- Failure handling
Topics interviewer focused on:
- API design
- Database schema
- Concurrency handling
- Distributed locking
- Scalability
- Performance optimization
- Notification flow
- State transitions
Managerial / Leadership Principles Round
Heavy focus on:
- Customer Obsession
- Ownership
Advice:
Prepare STAR-format stories thoroughly.
Behavioral topics included:
- Production incidents
- Taking ownership
- Difficult decisions
- Handling ambiguity
- Conflict resolution
- Improving customer experience
Overall interview focus:
- Strong coding fundamentals
- Scalable system design
- Leadership principles
- Real-world engineering thinking
Hope this helps others preparing for Amazon SDE2 interviews.