Amazon | SDE 2 | 4th time rejected | Jan 2026 | Bangalore
Current total exp - 6.5 yrs
Phone Screen(1 hour)
Problem: Partition to K Equal Sum Subsets (LC Hard).
Gave sorting in asc order then using two pointer approach. We both were not able to find where it will fail, but we knew it will fail :-)
Final approach: Backtracking with recursion, just told the skeleton and explained due to time constraints
Discussion around pruning and optimization.
Then recruiter scheduled four loop rounds, one was system design and other three DSA.
DSA round 1:
LP1: Tell a time where you broke production system or you were on call while it broke, what steps you take and how did you resolve ?
LP2: Tell a time where you lead/develop a technical project. How did you proceed about the same ? what was the success metric for project
Problem 1: Find min element in rotated sorted array
Problem 2:
https://leetcode.com/problems/132-pattern/description/
Was able to answer first three correctly, but only discussed approach for the third one and implemented the O(n^2 logn) approach.
LP took around 15 mins of total one hour
DSA Round 2:
LP1: Tell me a time where you took lead and saw some issues and resolve them ?
LP2: Tell me a time where you faced tight deadlines and how do you ensure that those are met
Problem 1: Flight connectivity problem(Given flights from city a to B and source/dest is given) → check if destination reachable.
-> Solved using graph + BFS/DFS.
-> Follow-up: flights with departure/arrival times, requiring path validation with time constraints.
Was able to code answer first three, for third there were bugs in the code but approach discussed was fine.
DSA Round 3:
LP1: When did you solve a complex problem with simple solution
LP2: Time when you disagreed with you rmanager and commit
Design question: EC2 instance discount system.
-> Implemented using Strategy Pattern with multiple discount types.
-> Focus on clean OOP design and extensibility.
Was able to answer all three correctly(afaik)
System Design:
Design “People who bought this also bought that” recommendation system.
Used order history to compute product associations.
Architecture: Order events → aggregation → recommendation store → API.
Discussed precomputation, caching, and scalable storage (NoSQL/Elastic).
-> This is the round where I think I screwed up big time, was nervous and did not understood/discussed the problem in depth and jumped straight to FR/NFR.
-> And when I tried to satisfy my FR I was fumbling, didn't had the clear path what I need to implement.
-> At end interviewer also gave hints which I was not able to use correctly.
After following up with recruiter for 2 weeks, got the rejection mail. It specifically mentioned that its is policy of amazon that they don't provide individual feedback. IDK when the policy changed coz for the last three times I got rejected I every time I got the feedback from recruiter itself.
You can find my hat-trick of amazon rejections here:
https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/2491633/amazon-sde-2-bangalore-july-2022-rejecte-gvgn/
Not at all sad, just saying !
Hope this helps !
Cheers !!