Amazon 2025 Interview | SDE2 | Offer
Apr 12, 2026
Career
Compensation
Interview
In-person interviews at Amazon office.
Round 1: DSA
First problem was a standard LCA.
Second problem was more interesting — you are given a list of words. You have to start from the smallest length word, and at every step you can add a single character such that the new word also exists in the list. The goal is to find the maximum length word achievable.
I inserted all words into a Trie and then traversed it while ensuring that every prefix along the path was a valid word (i.e., isEnd == true). This way I could directly find the longest valid word that can be built step by step.
Round 2: DSA
First question was a variation of expression evaluation using a stack.
Second was the classic recipes & ingredients problem where recipes can themselves act as ingredients for other recipes.
I modeled it as a graph problem and used DFS-based topological sort with a hashmap. Realised after the interview that BFS would have been much easier for this but was able to complete it well.
Both DSA rounds went really well.
Round 3: System Design
Was asked to design Truecaller.
This didn’t go well — I struggled a bit in structuring the system and trade-offs. I over complicated the solution by going with a graphDB based approach.
Because the DSA feedback was strong, they scheduled another round.
Round 4: System Design (Retry)
Was asked to design “Save as Draft”.
This was quite open-ended, so I focused heavily on requirement clarification first and completing with a simple approach. Interviewer added complexity with his follow-ups but was able to solve them. This round went much better.
Round 5: Hiring Manager
Mostly discussion around past projects and behavioral questions.
Nothing too tricky, went smoothly.
Round 6: Bar Raiser
Started with Kadane’s Algorithm as a warmup.
Then the interviewer said this is standard and gave an interesting puzzle:
Two divers are dropped from airplanes in a 2D plane. They don’t know their coordinates or relative positions (even who is left/right of whom).
Available APIs:
Move one unit left
Move one unit right
Check if both are at same position
Need to design a strategy/program to make them meet.
The key insight that helped me was thinking in terms of exploration similar to fast & slow pointer expansion.
Offer:
Base: 45
JB: 32 (18 + 14)
Stocks: 40 (5/15/25/45 vesting)
~65 LPA first year
YOE: 4
Decision: Declined — promotion at Adobe was due in a month and 5-day WFO wasn’t aligning with my priorities.