Amazon System Development Engineer (AFT Support) Interview Experience (3 YOE) – India – Rejected

I recently completed the interview process for an Amazon System Development Engineer (AFT Support) role (around 3 years of experience) and wanted to share my experience to help others prepare.

Interview Process

Round 1 – DSA

• Two coding questions.
• Difficulty: Medium.
• 2 pointer based question and DP question
• Focus was on problem solving rather than obscure algorithms.

Round 2 – Computer Fundamentals

Topics included:

• Linux
• Networking
• Operating System fundamentals
• Troubleshooting scenarios

Round 3 – Hiring Manager ROund

It involved standard LP question and experience related questions.
Then he gave me a Log processing question which I did well.

Round 4 - Bar Raiser Round

Purely LP round. I was grilled so much on Customer obsession and Deep Dive question and follow ups. More emphasis on metrics. This round too went well.

Recruiter told me this position got filled with other candidate and he is now trying to match me with other team and one additional hiring manager round needs to be taken.

After a month, he scheduled one round. But it was more like a DSA round than a managerial round. It was also taken by some SDE2 not by any manager stating that the manager is busy with some other work so he had asked one his team memeber to take my interview.

Final Additional Technical Round

The recruiter informed me that this would mainly focus on Coding, DSA, and Problem Solving because my previous coding signal was considered average.

However, the actual interview was quite different.

Question 1 – Loyal Customers

You are given two lists of logs.

Each log entry contains:

• timestamp
• customerId
• pageId

Find all loyal customers satisfying:

1. The customer visited the website on both days.
2. On each day, the customer visited more than two distinct pages.

Discussion revolved around:

• HashMap
• HashSet
• Optimizing from multiple maps to a single map
• Time and space complexity

Interestingly, the interviewer never asked me to code this solution.

Question 2 – Bomb Defusal

Given:

• digitSum
• numberOfDigits

Construct the smallest possible number having exactly the given number of digits and whose digits sum to the given value.

This wasn't a standard LeetCode pattern question. It required deriving the approach during the interview. I initially explored DP and binary search before realizing neither was appropriate. The interviewer then asked me to reason about the brute-force solution and its complexity.

Leadership Principles

I was asked only one Leadership Principle:

• Dive Deep

The interviewer spent a significant amount of time asking follow-up questions rather than moving on quickly.

Expect detailed probing such as:

• Why did you choose this approach?
• What metrics did you collect?
• What hypotheses did you eliminate?
• How did you isolate the root cause?
• What alternatives did you consider?
• Why was your final solution correct?

Be prepared to explain every technical detail of your story.

Final Feedback

Unfortunately, I was rejected.

The recruiter shared two pieces of feedback:

• Leadership Principles were rated excellent.
• My performance on the second technical question was the deciding factor.

My Advice

I got rejected from Amazon two times after all the rounds were taken. Feeling quite dissheartened and feel like faang is not made for me....