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Got the offer

Software Development Engineer-2 at Amazon

Difficulty
Process took
3-4 Weeks
Rounds
6
Format
Remote
Applied via
Other

How it went

  • Balance coding and explanation
  • Treat HLD like a real-world scalable system

What they would tell you

  • Balance coding and explanation
  • Treat HLD like a real-world scalable system

How to prepare

  • Leadership principles, prepare stories from past experiences, be ready for short scenario-based questions in every round
  • I followed Striver’s SDE Sheet, which helped me cover arrays, strings, trees, graphs, DP, and common patterns systematically.

Their background

Experience: 3.5 YOE Offer: Selected Location: Bangalore, India Recruiter reached out to me Interview process was mix of DSA, system design, low-level design, high-level design, and leadership principle discussions, spread over multiple rounds

Round by round

  1. 1

    OA60 min

    Online Assessment question on arrays, strings, and problem-solving, i don’t recall the exact questions. Assessment got me shortlisted for the screening round

  2. 2

    Screening round60 min

    Problem: Design a Typeahead Search system (mix of DSA and LLD) Goal: Given a prefix, return a list of suggestions efficiently Expected: Partial implementation, create a trie and cache results at each node. Parent node results were formed by the union of children nodes. Did not have to implement the full working system, but I explained modularity, caching strategy, and scalability considerations.

  3. 3

    DSA Round60 min

    Short discussion on leadership principles and past experiences.

    • Number of Islands, classic DFS/BFS problem.
    • Number of Ways to Build Sturdy Brick Wall, DP with combinatorial constraints.
    • Maximum Difference Between Node and Ancestor, Tree traversal + recursion.
  4. 4

    Low-Level Design Round60 min

    Problem: Design Ticket booking like system The problem statement was very uncertain, so I led the discussion Designed classes, methods, and interfaces for shows, bookings, and users At the end, discussed databases for storing entities, including the possibility of different databases for different modules.

  5. 5

    High Level Design Round60 min

    This round was engaging it started with Leadership Principle questions that went deep into how I handle conflicts, make decisions under uncertainty, and lead initiatives when things aren’t clearly defined. The interviewer wanted to understand my thought process rather than just outcomes, how I balance team opinions, take ownership, and deliver when timelines are tight. After about 25 minutes of LP discussion, we moved to the HLD problem, Design Chess.com Overall, it felt more like a collaborative design conversation than a grilling session.

  6. 6

    Bar raiser60 min

    Problem: Maximum Vacation Days, a similar DP-based problem

What came up

HardRemote3 4 years

A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.

Sources