Open In App

Amazon Interview Experience | SDE-2

Improve
Improve
Like Article
Like
Save
Share
Report

Hello Everyone,

I would like to share my experience in interviewing with Amazon for the SDE-2 position. I had 4.5 Years of experience while I was attending this interview.

I got a call from a recruiter in the US and I was told about the Amazon Hiring Event that would be happening in the last week of January 2020 in Hyderabad, India.

Round – 1: (Online Coding)
This was an online round, I was told based on the results of this round I will be asked to come for Onsite interviews.

1. Number of Islands in a matrix.

2. It was a similar kind of problem as mentioned above but instead of DFS here we had to use BFS, I couldn’t remember the question exactly.

After 2 days I got a confirmation that I have cleared the online round and was invited for Onsite Interviews to Hyderabad.

Round – 2: (Data Structures and Algorithms)
This round was taken by a Senior Software Engineer based out of the US.

1. You have been given a grid and a starting point. You are supposed to check if you can visit all the points and return to the starting point.

2. Project-related questions and behavioral questions.

Round – 3: (System Design)
This round was taken by a Senior Manager based out of India.

Amazon system is already in place design or upgrades Amazon’s existing system for Amazon’s Great Indian sale.

More Focus on Scalability, Availability, Single Point of failure, database, and low Latency.

Some Behavioral and Leadership questions were asked at the end of the interview.

Round – 4: (Data Structures and Algorithms)
This round was taken by a Senior Manager based out of India.

He asked me if I have worked on Maven applications. I told him yes. So the question was;

In pom.xml we add dependencies to utilize the methods of the package, how does the compiler know which module or package it has to resolve first.

I told him about Topological Sorting he agreed and asked me to write production-level code for the same.

A lot of Behavioral questions were asked in this round.

Round – 5: (Bar Raiser)
This round was again by a Senior Manager

This round was a combination of Requirements Gathering, Coding, Dynamic Change in requirements and System design.

So the question was to implement the Windows OS file search feature. For example, if I type .xml the system should show all the files of type .xml and also should check recursively in subdirectories.

The new change in the requirement was users can now filter by the size of the file.

I gave him a solution of the N-Ary tree where each node represents a file name, type, and size. To search for a file, we perform BFS of the N-Ary tree until we reach the end. He was satisfied and asked me to code the solution.

Result: Selected for full-time SDE-2 role.

I would like to thank GeeksForGeeks for creating such a useful platform to help aspiring candidates get a job in Multinational companies.

Tips and Suggestions to Candidates:

  1. Kindly explain your thought process when you are trying to solve a problem or designing a system. This will help the interviewer know if you are heading in the right direction and might help you in case you are stuck.
  2. Please don’t try to solve the problem with the most optimal solution in the first go. If you know the naive approach go ahead with that first, this will give the interviewer the impression that you can solve the problem. Once you have the naive approach then try to optimize it by discussing various approaches.
  3. Please don’t give up after 2 – 3 attempts, keep trying different data-structures and algorithms to solve the problem. This will show the interviewer that you have a never-give-up attitude and you have knowledge on other topics as well. If you follow this approach you will ultimately end up in solving the problem with at-least a naive approach.
  4. For System Design you can go through website https://www.educative.io/courses/grokking-the-system-design-interview -Grokking System Design (Paid course but worth it) and videos from https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRPMAqdtSgd0Ipeef7iFsKw – Gaurav Sen System Design
  5. Please don’t get disappointed if the interview results were not positive. Remember that the company could have various other reasons to reject the candidate irrespective of the interview going well. Learn from your mistakes if you had done it during the interview and take that experience for future interviews.

Last Updated : 26 Feb, 2020
Like Article
Save Article
Previous
Next
Share your thoughts in the comments
Similar Reads