My Amazon SDE-2 Interview Experience

May 31, 2025

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Over the past few months, I went through the interview processes at several top tech companies - DoorDash, Databricks, Amazon, Uber, Stripe, Rippling, and more. I thought it would be helpful to share what the experience was like, especially for anyone preparing for similar roles.

Let’s kick things off with my Amazon SDE-2 interview experience.

💰 Quick note: The SDE-2 role at Amazon starts with a package of ₹65 LPA+, depending on location and stock grants.

Application & Online Assessment

I applied through the Amazon job portal for multiple roles. On a Sunday, I received a link to the Online Assessment (OA).

The OA included two parts:

DSA (Data Structures & Algorithms)
SDE Simulation

I solved all the questions and soon after, received a mail that my interviews were lined up.

Interview Process Overview

DSA Round 1
DSA Round 2
System Design
Bar Raiser

Note: There’s no separate Hiring Manager (HM) round because Amazon integrates leadership principle questions at the end of every interview.

DSA Rounds (1 Hour Each)

Each round involved 2 coding questions, ranging from medium to hard difficulty (LeetCode level). The interviews were conducted via an internal portal (similar to HackerRank), where questions were pasted and we were asked to proceed step by step.

Structure I followed:

Clarify the problem
Propose a brute-force solution verbally
Optimize the solution and explain the approach
Write code for the optimal solution (no need to run it)
Dry run with test cases

⏱️ If you finish the first question within 30–35 minutes, they may give you a second one. I received a second question in both rounds.

At the end of each round, I was asked two leadership principle questions, which had to be answered using the STAR format.

What is STAR?

Situation – Describe the context
Task – What was the goal?
Action – What steps did you take?
Result – What was the outcome?

This format is crucial, prepare stories beforehand that map to Amazon's leadership principles.

System Design Round (1 Hour)

A manager conducted this round. It began with a high-level prompt like:

“Design Twitter.”

Then it's on you to figure out everything from scratch.

My approach:

Identify functional & non-functional requirements by discussing with the interviewer.
Start with a basic design for ~100 users.
Gradually scale it up to 1M users, explaining the reasoning and components along the way.

🎯 Key Insight:
Sometimes interviewers are not looking for broad coverage—they prefer deep dives into specific areas. If they steer the conversation toward one component, follow their lead. Going too broad when they expect depth may hurt your chances.

Bar Raiser Round

This is the most critical round. The outcome of the debrief is heavily influenced by the Bar Raiser.

The interviewer is usually from outside the hiring team to reduce bias. Mine was a very senior and calm individual.

We started with brief introductions, then jumped into a system design problem. I followed the same approach as in the earlier system design round, but this time the interviewer deep-dived into a specific part of the system.

They asked:

Multiple solution approaches
Pros & cons of each
Which one I'd choose and why

📌 Important: There's no single “right” answer. What's evaluated is your understanding of trade-offs and your ability to communicate decisions clearly. If your logic doesn’t align with the interviewer’s and you don’t justify it well, it's game over.

The round ended with leadership questions.

Resources I Followed

Final Thoughts

Amazon interviews are tough, structured, and fair. Be prepared to code, communicate, and tell your story. Don’t underestimate leadership questions, they matter as much as technical skills.

Hope this helps those preparing!

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