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Amazon | SDE 2 (L5) | Bangalore | April 2024 [Offer]

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Introduction

In Feb - April 2024, I had the opportunity to interview with Amazon for the position of SDE 2 (L5). Having 3.2 years of prior experience as an SDE 2 at a product-based MNC, I was excited to explore this new opportunity. Here’s a detailed account of my interview journey.

Application and Initial Contact

One of the Amazon recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn and requested me to share my resume over email. Within a week, received the online assessment link followed by 4 round of interview over next 2 months.

  • Company: Amazon
  • Position: SDE 2 (L5)
  • Interview Dates: Feb - March 2024
  • Offer Date: 2nd week of April 2024

Online Assessment

  • Question 1:
    Return the longest decreasing subsequence in a linked list.
    Similar to Longest Increasing Subsequence
  • Question 2:
    Given two categories of movie with start time and duration. Find the minimum time by which you can finish watching at least 1 movie of each category.

Round 1: Low Level Design (1 hr.)

  • Introduction and Leadership Principles: We started with introductions, followed by a couple of leadership questions like give a situation where you had to deep dive in code.
  • Design Question: Design Chat Messenger Like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger

Round 2: Coding (1 hr.)

  • Introduction and Leadership Principles: We started with introductions, followed by a couple of leadership questions like give a situation where you aimed for long term goal rather than short term.

  • Question 1:
    Given a matrix which contains blue and white balloons. At any given day all the white balloons surrounding the blue ones in 4 direction(up, down, left, right) are convert to blue ones. Return minimum number of days required to convert all balloons to blue
    Follow up:
    How to get the number of blue balloons at any given day (0 to MAX_DAY)
    Input:
    W W W W
    W W B W
    W W W W
    B W W W

    Output: 3

    Explanation:
    Day 1:
    W W B W
    W B B B
    B W B W
    B B W W
    Day 2:
    W B B B
    B B B B
    B B B B
    B B B W
    Day 3:
    B B B B
    B B B B
    B B B B
    B B B B

    Approach: BFS

  • Question 2:
    Amazon Provides a locker service for packages

    1. Design a function which returns the locker to be open when a package is received
    2. Design a function to retrieve the package of a given customer
      For simplicity, assume packages can be of 3 sizes: small, medium and large.
      Verbally discussed the algorithm and data structures due to lack of time.

Round 3: Hiring Manager, High Level Design (1 hr.)

  • Introduction and Leadership Principles: We started with introductions, followed by a couple of leadership questions and discussion on my project.
  • Question: Design Auto Complete / search recommendations in Amazon Search
    Assumption: Given a ranking algorithm which returns the search priority.
    Target: Show top 5 searches.

Round 4: Bar Raiser, Coding (1 hr.)

  • Introduction and Leadership Principles: We started with introductions, followed by a couple of leadership questions.

  • Question 1: Given a Binary Tree, return the maximum sum of the subset such that no two nodes in any subset are adjacent.

  • Question 2: Print the subset for last question

  • I completely solved the question 1 with dry run, and verbally discussed how to improve the algorithm to print the subset.

Feedback

Received the hire feedback within a week and compensation details were finalized next week.

Result

Accepted the offer.

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