Amazon SDE 2 Interview Experience | Texas

Hello - just wanted to share my SDE 2 interview experience in case it is helpful to someone in the same shoes.

Recruiter Cold Email:
A recruiter reached out to me regarding an opportunity to work on large scale, distirbuted systems on amazon stores. She had sourced my resume from their DB and thought that I would be a great candidate for the SDE2 role. I already had a job as a SWE 3 at JPMC. I have good pay and a great role working with modern tech (AWS, Kakfa, Spark, Java) on a cool project. I thought why not give it a shot anyways, the worst that can happen is I get rejected and would still be good with my current role.

Online-Assessment:
Recruiter moved me forward to the OA stage. I took it and cleared it. It had 2 medium level coding questions in 90 minutes. The questions weren't from leetcode, but if you have been practicing leetcode, it's pretty doable. One is about arrays and the other about strings.

Final round:
After clearing the OA, she moved me directly to the final round and said the hiring manager really likes my profile and wants me to expedite the process. I had the final round on 09/30/24. It was 4 interviews, 1 hour each, which consisted of 30 mins LP questions and 30 mins technical. The technical questions included 2 coding, 1 system design, and 1 low level design (class and interface level). The interviewers weren't expecting me to completely finish the coding questions, they just wanted to analyze and observe my problem solving. They were all happy with my solutions and approaches. In fact, they've all said if I had a few more mins I'd have finished this. So they can see where I was headed with my solution. System desing went well. LLD part, didn't go as great, but I still got buy in from interviewer. Coding questions were graph related (BFS/DFS) and time interval. They were embedded in a business like problem statement, so you'd have to extract out the core problem.

Result:
2 days later, I received automated response that they weren't moving forward with me. I thought overall I had a good performance, but looks like it wasn't enough. If I was to bet on what it was, I'd say either the LLD section or the overall LP responses I had. Which from the interview, interviewers mentioned what I was saying made sense. Anyways, it was good experience. I am not losing sleep over it. I know that interviews are just a numbers game.

Advice:
Practice leetcode daily on the days leading up to your final round. Do medium problems. Hard is overkill for SDE2 given that you get 25-30 mins to code. They mostly care about problem solving skills. Second advice is, practice LP questions. Leverage STAR framework, it makes it easy for interviewers to follow.