Interview Experience of Amazon – SDE2

Some time ago a recruiter by Amazon(Bangalore) contacted me, to schedule an interview for SDE-2 . This is the story of the hiring process.
First of all, the hiring process takes a long time. They are not slow, since the procedure is made of different phases:

1.Problem Solving Rounds – 2
2.Manager Round – 1
3.High Level Design – 2
4.Low Level Design – 2

I’ve been through all the 7 rounds at Amazon and it took me 4 visits(one month) to onsite for attending all the rounds, So one has to be
patient with the Amazon’s interview process.But sadly I got feedback saying ‘Not Performing Well in LLD round’ and
they will consider my profile soon again .

Problem Solving Round – 1:
Time: 45min
Interviewer: SDE3’s (Panel of 2)

Question1: You have given a numbers in a triangular fashion, you need to print maximum sum of a path from root .

Question2: Generate random number from 1 to 8 with 1/8 probability.

Problem Solving Round – 2:
Time: 45min
Interviewer: SDE2

Question1: You have given a matrix of 0’s and 1’s where 0 represent Home and 1 represent Hospital, you need to returnedge distance matrix with shortest distance of each houses to the nearest hospital.

Question2: You have given two vectors say a1x+a2y+….. and b1x+b2y+…. . Find best way to store these vectors and return
vector sum of given vectors.

Manager Round:
Time: 45min
Interviewer: Senior Manager of Alexa, India.

Question1) Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with your manager and how did you handle it .
Question2) Tell me about a time when you could not deliver a task in time.
Question3) Detail about current projects and challenges faced.
Question4) Design Facebook Timeline (Higher Level Design)
Question5) Tell me about a time when you faced a challenge

High Level Design – 1:
Time: 60min
Interviewer: SDE2

Question1: This Question was from my project where I need to explain server side architecture of Bi-Directional Syncing framework.
           Then, we discussed on ‘How to Scale it for multi-million users’.
Question2:  Design Amazon Flash Sales System .
    There is a Amazon Sale is going on for a day in India and USA using same inventory (shared b/w India and USA ).
                    How you will handle Transactions, concurrency etc .

Higher Level Design – 2:
Time: 30min
Interviewer: SDE2
Question1: Design BookmyShow .

Low Level Design – 1:
Time: 30min
Interviewer: SDE2

Question1: Design BookmyShow with all the classes and relations .
   Adding up to above question, later interview asked ‘How you can modify your code to take care of events booking along with movies’.

Low Level Design – 2:
Time: 45min
Interviewer: Software development Manager, PrimeVideo and SDE3 (Panel of 2)

Question1: Design File Convertor like converting xml to Json, etc with all the classes and relations .
There are some behavioural questions as well like ‘Why you want to join Amazon’, etc .

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I feel that I was not able to perform well in the last round to gather requirements from Interviewer and got baffled in the final round.

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I am sharing few resources which i have used while preparing for tech interviews for companies like Amazon or Google.

Problem Solving:
1) LeetCode – Did Solve Top 150 questions of Google + 50 written Mock interviews .
2) GeeksforGeeks – To understand concepts behind LeetCode problems .

Low Level Design:
 1.Grokking Object Oriented Design Interview
 2.Head First Design patterns

High Level Design:
 1.Grokking System Design Interview
 2.HighScalability Blog – All time favorites section
 3.Youtube Channel by TechDummies-Narendra L

Pramp:
In-person Mock interviews – 15

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I haven’t been through head first design pattern book before the interview but currently going through it . So, I feel this book will definitely help you in developing thought process of Low Level Design.
Practice is the key, make sure you give 2-3 hrs of day time for interview preparation sincerely .
Note: You can know more about me www.xcodedoctor.com