What a Software engineer should know?
Control the controlables, sharpen your skills and when opportunity rings, say yes.
What a Software engineer should know?
What a CS engineer should know and understand, irrespective of you interview anywhere or not, just like a doctor should know medicine.
If you don’t know some of the basic and fundamental things about CS then you should not call yourself a CS engineer. It’s not the B.tech/BE degree which you hold but the understanding of the concepts that make you an engineer.
a) The computing model: A CPU which performs operations by moving and transforming bits from one memory location to another. So, you must understand every algo boils down to the interaction between CPU and RAM. What is a stack/heap or what is meant by malloc/free/paging/segmentation fault/ null access etc everything is all out how CPU interacts with RAM? Understand this and you understand how computing actually works.
b) Data structures and algorithms: Understand why we need a data-structure and why we go such a length to develop an algo? How does a O(n) and O(n^2) differ in practice, not the concept but in actuality? Like, try to implement bubble sort and quick sort and run it on an array of size 100 million. Now once you understand the immense importance of this, then try to learn about the most common DS and Algos and understand how and WHY is one better suited to one situation than other? ex: if I need to find if an element is present in the set what should I use? A hashtable? but what if I need to perform that operation just 2 times? Wouldn’t an array make more sense? (more of this in part 2), Also understand when a linked list is not a great solution and when a BST is better than an array? Now try to imagine a world where BST was not known to mankind and if you were to invent BST, how might you arrive at it? What is the motivation behind BST? I am not saying get it right, but at least give it a try, try to think deeply about what makes BST special (this will help if you have to arrive at your own algorithms).
c) Operating systems /Networks: Similar to (b), what matters more is “WHY” something works rather than “HOW”.
d) Large Scale System Design and Architecture
Preparing for jobs at top tier companies
Interview Experience + Strategy
https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6657524/offer-amazon-india-sde-2-loop-offered-sd-yn0n/
[Offer] Amazon India | SDE-2 Loop → Offered SDE-1 | Interview Experience + Strategy
Anonymous User
Apr 16, 2025
Background
Experience: 2.5 years as a SDE Education: Tier-3 college
🧠 Online Assessment
Got an invite for SDE-2 OA, and was able to solve 15/15 test cases on both questions. I can’t share the exact problems (NDA), but the patterns were around:
Prefix + Suffix handling Sliding window with maps and constraints
Then workstyle simulation and more sections for SDE2 I received a call within a few days for onsite in office (offline) rounds at the Amazon office in Bangalore, 2 round same day and if I clear any one of them then HM round same day. I had roughly 3 weeks to prepare.
🧰 Prep Strategy
With limited time, I focused heavily on:
DSA: Continued solving daily on LeetCode, targeting mediums and selected hards
LLD & HLD: Followed case studies and made notes from YouTube + system design primers
Leadership Principles (LPs): Practiced 1-2 stories per day.
Mock Interviews: Did at least one mock every alternate day (coding or LP focus), I used ChatGPT to simulate mock interviews.
Note : as I was already working so managing time between my work and prepration was little challenging
🧪 Interview Rounds
📍 Round 1: DSA (Onsite)
Questions (similar):
Longest Common Subsequence Longest Palindromic Substring Zigzag Level Order Traversal of Binary Tree
🔍 My approach: Started with recursion, moved to memoization, and then converted to bottom-up DP for LCS and palindrome problems. Solved and coded them on paper. No laptop was given to code.
No LPs were asked in this round.
Verdict: Inclined
✅ Felt good about this one — interviewer was engaged, gave a thumbs-up when I optimized LCS properly. One big advantage of offline interviews.
📍 Round 2: LLD + LP
Design Task: IRCTC Booking System (Railway Reservation System)
Not trivial. Time was limited. I couldn’t complete the entire flow but broke it down:
Showed how I would model trains, stations, routes Focused on core booking module and conditions
Wrote high-level class structure + some pseudocode
🎙️ LPs: Can’t recall exactly, but there were 2–3 light behavioral questions. Focus was more on LLD.
💬 Interviewer said: “You prioritized the right module and communicated clearly, that’s what we wanted.”
Verdict: Inclined
📍 Round 3: HLD + Hiring Manager
🚨 This was the toughest round for me.
📌 LPs First:
Faced deep LP questions focused on failure handling, technical ownership, and customer impact. Struggled here — I wasn’t able to articulate some challenges well as interviewer was looking for more and more technical challanges and he was not able to relate tried my best to explain him but was not impressed
🛠️ Design Question: Twitter with some custom requirements
I was expecting caching, pub-sub etc., but midway I froze. Couldn’t cover scaling properly.
😞 I knew I fumbled this one. But recruter told that they would take BR round.
Verdict: Not Inclined
📍 Round 4: Bar Raiser (After ~20 days!)
🎙️ LPs first:
Initially nervous, but managed to answer convincingly once I got into the groove. Focused on Ownership, Dive Deep, and Invent & Simplify. Interviewer nodded and asked meaningful follow-ups, which helped ease nerves.
DSA Find Max Path Sum in Binary Tree (including negative values) Follow-up: Print the path as well
Thankfully I’d solved this exact pattern in practice a week earlier! Used recursion + backtracking + tracking global max.
🎯 Had a great discussion with the interviewer. Felt really positive leaving this round.
Verdict: Inclined ✅
📬 Final Outcome
Was told that overall feedback was good, but I would be offered SDE-1, not SDE-2.
💸 Compensation:
Detailed post https://leetcode.com/discuss/post/6657596/amazon-india-sde-1-25-yoe-tier-3-college-3hqv/
🧠 Key Learnings
✅ What Helped: Structured revision plan (thanks to ChatGPT) DSA grind — especially recursion + DP patterns Deep LLD understanding and communicating tradeoffs clearly LP story prep — having different stories for all situtaions
❌ What Didn’t: Didn’t rehearse enough for HLD questions, just saw videos.
📢 Final Advice If you’re interviewing for Amazon (especially SDE-2):
🔹 Know your LPs cold — frame them like stories with challenge, action, result [STAR pattern] 🔹 Practice system design under time pressure — even partial solutions are fine if you explain your decisions and focus on what recruter is looking for 🔹 Nail fundamentals — recursion, backtracking, trees, sliding window, DP 🔹 Keep your confidence even if one round feels shaky
Happy to answer questions or help anyone preparing — just drop a comment here or share your linkedin or discord! 💬
Good luck to everyone preparing — it’s intense, but totally worth it 🙌
Note : Questions mentioned above are similar questions not the exact questions asked
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