Got the offerSDE-II at Amazon
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 5-6 Weeks
- Rounds
- 4
- Format
- Remote
- Applied via
- Company Website
How it went
- This process was really long and had a few surprises, but staying patient, honest, and flexible helped me cross the finish line. If you’re preparing for Amazon or any big company work on your problem-solving, but also be ready to share your real work stories
What they would tell you
- This process was really long and had a few surprises, but staying patient, honest, and flexible helped me cross the finish line. If you’re preparing for Amazon or any big company work on your problem-solving, but also be ready to share your real work stories
How to prepare
- OOP, DSA
- Practice explaining “why” you choose a particular solution, not just “how.”
- For design interviews, don’t jump straight into code. Take a moment to organize your thoughts, talk about major parts first, then fill in details.
Their background
I’ve been working as a backend developer for a few years and have spent a lot of time solving coding problems, building features, and learning about system design. I always try to explain my thinking clearly, and I like to stay calm and adapt, no matter what kind of challenge I face in interviews. I applied for SDE-II via a referral about 3 months back and cleared the online assessment. But the recruiter then asked if I wanted a Systems Developer role instead the role that i have applied. I wasn’t interested, so the process stopped. About one months later, a different recruiter contacted me. She said I was still eligible for SDE-II and scheduled two rounds of interviews. I was surprised but agreed.
Round by round
- 1
DSA 190 min
The round began with detailed questions about Amazon’s Leadership Principles. We spent almost 40 minutes talking about past experiences and how I handle tough situations. Then, I was given a coding problem: Find the shortest path between two spots on a chessboard (with obstacles). I explained my idea (using BFS) and discussed why this was better than DFS. The interviewer also had his own preferred solution. For example, he wanted me to use a set to track visited nodes instead of a boolean array. I adapted quickly and worked the way he liked.
- 2
Low-Level Design60 min
Once again, the round started with leadership principle questions. The main technical challenge was: Design an Airline Reservation System. I started by clarifying requirements: we discussed flights, seats, bookings, cancellations, users, and handling overlapping reservations. I broke down the system into key parts, like booking management, seat allocation, user notifications, and real-time updates for availability. I mapped out major classes (Flight, Reservation, User, Payment, etc.), described relationships, and pointed out the need for atomic operations to avoid double-booking. The interviewer asked me to go deeper on how to avoid two people booking the same seat at the same time, so I talked about using locking mechanisms at the seat level and transaction control. We also spoke about how to support flexible search (date, route, airlines), how to handle high traffic, and what would change if the system scaled globally. He wanted to know how refunds, payment failures, or seat hold and release would be managed, and I walked through each scenario aloud. It was a good back-and-forth and made me think about practical details, not just object models.
- 3
High-Level System Design70 min
Leadership questions for about 30 minutes. The challenge was to Design an online coding judge platform. I wasn’t as strong in high-level design, so I was a bit nervous. Still, I mapped out the big parts, like how problems are stored, how code gets tested, leaderboards, and how everything talks to each other. I finished the basics by the end.
- 4
Bar Raiser60 min
Started with leadership questions for about 20 minutes. The main problem: Given tasks with dependencies (think a to-do list, but some things must be done before others), write a program to schedule them without any task getting stuck forever (no starvation). The interviewer didn’t want the usual queue-based solution, so he left hints for using DFS in topological sorting. I caught on and changed my approach to match.
What came up
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.