Timeline
- DM'ed recruiter: looking for openings
- HackerRank link: 3 days after DM
- Recruiter follow-up: ~2 weeks after OA
- Interview scheduling: 10 more days
- All 4 rounds: within a week
- Offer: 2 days after bar raiser
Background
- 3 YOE at quick commerce startups (Swiggy and Zepto)
- Used Golang primarily
- No prior FAANG experience
Round 1 — Online Assessment (HackerRank)
2 DSA questions (both Medium):
- Binary search based — standard medium
- Trees — traversal/manipulation problem
Followed by LP-based multiple choice questions (behavioral scenarios with choice-based answers).
Nothing tricky here. Standard OA.
Round 2 — System Design (60 min)
Problem: Design an auction platform.
Interviewer focused on:
- Database schemas (how to model bids, auctions, users)
- Scaling for high concurrency (many bids at once)
- Low latency API design (caching layer)
No LPs asked. Instead, asked me to explain an interesting project from past work.
Follow-ups asked:
- How do you handle edits to bids? (I suggested allowing multiple bids rather than edit — cleaner audit trail)
- How would you support a near real-time leaderboard? (Redis sorted sets)
- How would you identify/track the winning bid? (Can't rely on Redis as source of truth — need DB confirmation)
Prep that helped: Hello Interview. Hadn't solved this exact question before but the framework was familiar enough.
Verdict: Passed with good feedback.
Round 3 — HM / LLD Discussion (60 min)
This was supposed to be an LLD round but ended up being mostly project discussion:
- Deep dive into my work at Zepto — architecture, design choices
- "Could you build the inventory service using NoSQL instead of SQL?" — trade-off discussion
- Last 10 minutes: what design patterns I used in past projects (explained Strategy and Observer patterns from real code)
No formal LLD problem. No LPs asked.
Verdict: Positive feedback. I was worried because no actual LLD question was asked — but turns out the project discussion WAS the evaluation.
Round 4 — DSA (60 min)
Interviewer was a younger SDE-2.
Questions:
- Implement browser history navigation — forward, back, visit new URL. Used a doubly linked list / two-stack approach.
- *Implement basic arithmetic (+, -, , /) without inbuilt functions — bit manipulation for addition, repeated addition for multiplication, etc.
I coded in Golang. The interviewer wasn't familiar with Go and I had to explain syntax basics. Felt like the interviewer wasn't able to ask proper follow-ups because of the language gap.
Verdict: Positive but slightly hesitant.
Bar Raiser (60 min)
LPs: Focused heavily on Ownership. Needed strong STAR stories demonstrating end-to-end ownership of features/systems.
DSA Questions:
- Rotten Oranges — multi-source BFS on grid. Classic.
- Asteroid Collisions — stack-based simulation.
Both are well-known problems. Speed and clean implementation mattered.
Verdict: Passed.
The Offer
Heard back in 2 days:
- Base: ₹46L
- Joining bonus: ₹29L (split over 2 years)
- ESOPs: ₹38L (4-year vest)
Tips for Amazon SDE-2
- DM recruiters directly — it works. Be specific about the role you want.
- System design prep: Hello Interview + watching mock interviews. They focus on DB schema, caching, and scaling — not just drawing boxes.
- LPs are unpredictable — some rounds ask them heavily, some don't ask at all. Prepare 8+ stories anyway.
- HM round might not have a formal LLD problem — your project deep dive IS the evaluation. Know your past work intimately.
- Language choice matters slightly — if you use a less common language (Go, Rust), the interviewer might not be able to probe as deeply. Double-edged sword.
- Bar raiser DSA is medium difficulty — but you need to solve FAST with clean code. They're calibrating speed + quality, not just correctness.