Hi everyone,

I recently completed the Amazon SDE-2 interview loop for India (HYD). I’m sharing my experience here since reading these posts helped me a lot during my own preparation.

👤 Background

• Experience: 4.5 years
• Current Role: SDE-2 at a major global bank
• Overall Process: Online Assessment (OA) ➔ Technical Screen ➔ 4 Virtual Onsite Rounds
• Note: Every round included a deep dive into Amazon's Leadership Principles (LPs) alongside the technical coding/design questions.

💻 Round 1: Online Assessment (OA)

The standard Amazon OA format.

• Coding: 2 Medium-level DSA questions.
• Work Simulation: Standard Amazon scenario-based assessment.
• LP Assessment: Questionnaire mapping to core Leadership Principles.

🛠️ Round 2: Technical Screen

Format: 1 DSA Question + 2 LP Discussions

Technical Problem: Secure the Network by Disconnecting One Facility Center

A company has a network of Facility Centers (FCs) represented as a graph. Some FCs are compromised. If a compromised FC is connected to other FCs, the compromise spreads to all directly or indirectly connected nodes. You are allowed to disconnect exactly one compromised FC. Find which FC to remove such that the maximum number of clean FCs are saved. (If multiple FCs save the same number of nodes, return the FC with the smallest ID).

• Similar to: Minimize Malware Spread

Key Discussion Areas:

• Connected components
• DFS / Union Find
• Edge cases and constraints
• Time and Space Complexity

Leadership Principles Covered:

• Customer Obsession
• Ownership

🏗️ Round 3: Low-Level Design (LLD)

Format: LLD + LP Discussions

Technical Problem: Design a Shipping Cost Calculator

Design a system to calculate shipping costs based on multiple dynamic conditions, including weight, distance, delivery type, priority shipping, region-based pricing, and special handling.

My Approach & Discussion:

• The interviewer heavily indexed on an extensible design.
• I utilized the Strategy Pattern for the pricing rules and separated the rule evaluation from the orchestration logic.
• Deep Dive Topics: Avoiding large if-else chains, seamlessly adding new pricing rules in the future, overall maintainability, and extensibility.

Leadership Principles Covered:

• Insist on High Standards
• Invent and Simplify

🧩 Round 4: Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA)

Format: 2 Coding Problems + 2 LP Discussions

Problem 1: Streaming Median

Given an array of delivery times, output the median of all values seen so far after each new delivery time arrives.
Input: [5, 17, 100, 11]
Output: [5, 5, 17, 11]
Approach: Solved using the Two Heaps pattern (Max-Heap and Min-Heap).

Problem 2: House Robber

Given values in houses arranged in a line, find the maximum value that can be stolen without robbing two adjacent houses.
Input: [6, 7, 1, 3, 8, 2, 4]
Output: 19

Leadership Principles Covered:

• Deliver Results
• Earn Trust

📐 Round 5: Hiring Manager (System Design)

Format: High-Level Design (HLD) + LP Discussions

Technical Problem: Design Zomato (Food Delivery App)

Design the core architecture for a food delivery platform like Zomato.

Key Discussion Areas:

• Restaurant onboarding & Menu management
• Search & Discovery
• Order placement & Payments
• Delivery assignment & Real-time tracking
• Notifications

Deep Dive Topics:

• System scaling and Database choices
• Caching strategies
• Real-time tracking mechanisms
• Event-driven architecture and Failure handling
• Note: The HM asked continuous follow-up questions focusing on tradeoffs and system bottlenecks.

Leadership Principles Covered:

• Are Right, A Lot
• Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

🧗 Round 6: Bar Raiser

Format: 1 DSA Problem + Deep Behavioral/LP Discussions

Technical Problem: Employee Ratings Management System

A company maintains ratings for employees and needs to process operations in real time.
Operations:

1. 1 x : Add an employee with rating x.

2. 2 : Print the highest rating AND the index of the employee having the highest rating (If multiple employees have the same highest rating, return the first occurrence).

3. 3 i : Delete the employee at index i (Note: Indices shift after deletion).

Challenge: Designing an efficient data structure supporting Insert, Delete-by-index, and Query-max + first-occurrence simultaneously.

Leadership Principles Covered:

• Customer Obsession
• Ownership

Experience: This was the toughest round for me. The behavioral discussion went incredibly deep with a barrage of follow-up questions probing into past decisions, failures, system impact, and technical tradeoffs.

📉 Final Verdict & Key Takeaways

Status: Rejected

I heard back from the recruiter, and unfortunately, it's a reject. The feedback indicated that while the performance was highly competitive, the Hiring Manager and the Bar Raiser ultimately felt they needed a candidate who aligned better with a few specific deep-dive areas they were looking for.

Even though it didn't go my way, here is what I observed the panel indexing on the most:

• Communication: Absolute clarity while communicating your thought process under pressure.
• Tradeoffs: Being able to articulate why you chose a specific database, data structure, or pattern over another.
• LP Depth: Superficial LP answers won't cut it (especially in the Bar Raiser). They want to see genuine ownership, data-driven metrics, and deep impact in your past projects.

Hope this breakdown helps someone out there preparing. On to the next one!