Amazon | SDE 2 | Recent Interview Experiences | 2026 | Set-58

Question

Amazon SDE 2 Interview Prep & Experience | OA + 4 Rounds | System Design

Amazon

Applied directly via the Amazon Careers portal. Total process took about [X weeks]. Sharing this to give back to the community!

 

Online Assessment (OA)

Coding: 3 Hard DSA questions.

 

System Design MCQ: Covered DB choices, batch processing vs. async message queues. Pretty straightforward if you know the basics.

 

Work Style Assessment: Standard Amazon Leadership Principle (LP) questions (Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree). Tip: Be consistent with your answers.

 

Round 1: DSA & LP

Technical:

 

Minimum Passes Over a Permutation

First Unique Number - Solved in O(NlogN) (Used a Map + Set approach).

LP Questions:

Deliver Results: Tell me about a time you compromised quality to deliver quickly.

Invent and Simplify: Improved an existing process in your team.

Round 2: High-Level Design (HLD) & LP

 

Technical: High-level design of a Vending Machine Leasing Company.

Focus: Monitoring machine inventory, leasing contracts, and maintenance scheduling.

Round 3: Low-Level Design (LLD) & LP

 

Technical: Design streaming error-log counting with moving average

Features: Search, Sort, Ordering, and Rating systems.

Focus: Scalability of the rating service and class relationships.

Round 4: Bar Raiser (DSA/Logic & LP)

 

Technical: Variant of Car Pooling.

Modification: Instead of a boolean, return the maximum number of passengers in the car at any point.

Approach: Sweep-line algorithm / TreeMap.

LP Questions:

Customer Obsession: Went above and beyond for a customer.

Dealing with Ambiguity: Delivered something impactful with vague requirements.

My Takeaways / Tips

 

LP is 50% of the battle: Don't sleep on the Leadership Principles. Prepare 2 stories for each principle using the STAR method.

 

System Design: For SDE 2, focus on trade-offs (e.g., Why SQL over NoSQL for a specific use case?).

 

Communication: Keep talking through your thought process during DSA. It helps the interviewer steer you if you get stuck.

 

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments! Happy to help.