Amazon | SDE 2 | Sept 2026 | Rejected

Company: Amazon
Role: SDE 2

Current Org: Startup
College: Tier-1
YOE: 8+
Current Comp: ~65L (Cash component) + ESOPs

Note: A friend referred me for an SDE 2 position. I was skeptical about interviewing for SDE 2 with 8+ years of experience, but gave it anyway for the interview experience.

Online Assessment (OA)

• DSA Question: Graph problem requiring DFS + binary search on the answer space.
• AI Coding Round: Fix some issues in a codebase for an IMDb-like site.
• Amazon Work Style Survey.

Screening Round

• Leadership Principles (LP) questions.
• DSA Question 1: Top K frequent elements in an array. I proposed a min-heap approach, but the interviewer specifically wanted in-place bottom-up heapify.
• DSA Question 2: Find a substring in another string, but matching word-by-word. Solved it using a hash map after a few hints from the interviewer.
• Note: Was not sure if I'd make it past this round, but received an invite for the online loop after 3–4 days.

Loop - Round 1 (DSA)

• LP questions focused on my most important project.
• DSA Question: LFU Cache. I was not able to achieve the optimal $O(1)$ time complexity for all operations.

Loop - Round 2 (LLD)

• Design a delivery slot booking system for Amazon Fresh.

Loop - Round 3 (Hiring Manager)

• LP questions: Biggest failure/mistake, conflict with PM/team.
• System Design: Design CoWIN (vaccine appointment booking platform).
• Observation: Felt the manager already knew Round 1 didn't go well; he didn't seem very engaged during the interview.

Loop - Round 4 (Bar Raiser)
Initially scheduled alongside the loop, but got postponed by two weeks.

• LP questions: Something you did outside of work, conflict with PM.
• DSA Question 1: Variation of Lowest Common Ancestor (LCA) in an N-ary tree.
• DSA Question 2: Shortest cost path in a weighted graph.

Verdict: Rejected. Received the rejection email two days after the Bar Raiser round.