Amazon Interview Experience for SDE 2 (L5) Hyderabad April 2024 [got the Offer letter]
Introduction
In February to April 2024, I had the chance to interview with Amazon for the SDE 2 (L5) role. With 2.8 years of previous experience as an SDE 3 at a P-based recruiters MNC, I was eager to explore this new opportunity. Here’s a detailed account of my interview journey.
Application and Initial Contact
One of the Amazon recruiters 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 the P-based 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 the Longest Increasing Subsequence
Question 2:
- Given two categories of movies 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-Levela 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 a 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 containing blue and white balloons, where on any given day, all the white balloons surrounding the blue ones in four directions (up, down, left, right) are converted to blue ones. Return the 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
- Design a function which returns the locker to be open when a package is received
- 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 question 1 with a dry run and discussed verbally how to improve the algorithm for printing the subset. I received the hiring feedback within a week, and the compensation details were finalized the following week.
Result
the