Amazon | SDE 2 | Recent Interview Experiences | 2026 | Set-65

Question

Failed my Amazon SDE-2 interview. Here's what happened. | 3.8 years | India

Got through the OA and landed two interview rounds. Didn't make it through.

 

OA: Two questions — minimum operations to make all stocks NULL (binary search + greedy scheduling) and count valid ways to restore inventory levels with missing values (DP with prefix/suffix sums). Cleared both, moved to interviews.

 

DSA round: Maximum sliding window — I went with a heap, overcomplicated it. An O(n) deque solution existed and I didn't see it fast enough. Second question was course completion (topological sort via BFS) — knew the approach, ran out of time before finishing implementation.

 

Bar Raiser round: Hybrid DSA/design question — max word visible on a scrollable screen with scroll-based line removal. LP questions on Customer Obsession and Learn and Be Curious. Feedback was that my communication was fragmented and I struggled to structure my narrative clearly under pressure.

 

LLD round: LRU cache with a time constraint and fixed size. I know this problem. Didn't execute cleanly enough under the clock (it is just that i needed more practice).Asked questions on concurrency - got fumbled

 

The feedback was fair. I overcomplicate things. I know the direction but take too long to converge. I need to communicate more precisely under pressure.

 

None of that is permanent.

 

I'm going back to fundamentals — sliding window, graphs, LRU, LLD patterns, structured storytelling. And I'm coming back.

 

If you've failed a big one and bounced back, I'd love to hear how.