Amazon SDE-2 (L5) Interview Experience — India | 2 Years 8 Months

Nikhil Sharma — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 11:01:27 +0000

After nearly a month of interviews, reschedules, and a few uncertain moments, I finally received the good news — selected for Amazon SDE-2 (L5). 🚀

Around the same time, I also received another offer, which made this phase of my interview journey even more memorable.

Role: SDE-2 (L5)
Location: India
Experience: 2 Years 8 Months
Applied Through: Recruiter
Overall Difficulty: Medium–Hard

💻 Online Assessment

The OA consisted of 2 DSA questions.

I was able to clear the OA, but there was no update for quite some time. Later, a recruiter reached out and asked if I was still interested in the SDE-2 role.

🧠 Round 1 — DSA

Duration: 60 minutes

I was asked 2 DSA questions:

Dynamic Programming — Pick / Not-Pick pattern

Binary Tree — Variation of Children Sum Property

I was able to solve both questions and explain:

Approach

Time and space complexity

Edge cases

The round also included 2 Amazon Leadership Principles (LP) questions toward the end.

Overall, the round went well.

🏗️ Round 2 — LLD
Duration: 60 minutes

Problem: Design a Ride Matching Service

The discussion covered:

Classes and responsibilities

Rider and Driver modelling

Ride lifecycle

Driver availability

Matching logic

SOLID principles

Extensibility

Design patterns

There were also 2 Leadership Principles questions.

This wasn't my strongest round, and the recruiter later mentioned that the feedback was mixed.

🌐 Round 3 — HLD

Duration: 60 minutes

Problem: Design Uber

We discussed:

Functional and non-functional requirements

Ride request flow

Finding nearby drivers

Rider-driver matching

Real-time location updates

Major services

Database design

Caching

Service communication

Scalability

Handling concurrent requests

Failure scenarios

I was comfortable with this discussion, and the round went well.

The final part again included Leadership Principles questions.

🔥 Round 4 — Bar Raiser

Duration: 60 minutes

My Bar Raiser round was postponed multiple times.

The coding question was based on Graphs. I solved it using BFS, and we also discussed how the problem could be extended using Dijkstra's Algorithm.

After that, we discussed:

My current work

Projects

Technical decisions

Challenges I faced

Why I made certain decisions

The final ~20 minutes were mostly Leadership Principles questions, with multiple follow-ups around my decisions, challenges, impact, and learnings.

✅ Final Result
After completing all the rounds, I still wasn't completely sure about the result, especially because of the mixed feedback from my LLD round.

I followed up with the recruiter the next week and finally received the good news:

Selected for Amazon SDE-2 (L5). 🚀

The complete process took around 1 month.

🎯 Key Takeaway

One thing I learned from the Amazon interview process is that Leadership Principles should not be treated as a formality.

In my interviews, LP questions were asked across the rounds, and the Bar Raiser round had several follow-ups.

📚 Resources
A few resources I used during my preparation:

DSA: Striver's A2Z DSA Sheet — https://takeuforward.org/prep-hub/strivers-a2z-dsa-sheet

LLD: Target Trek — Mastering System Design LLD — https://targettrek.in/book/system-design/lld

HLD: Target Trek — Mastering System Design HLD — https://targettrek.in/book/system-design/hld

These helped me structure my preparation across DSA, LLD, and HLD instead of jumping randomly between topics.

I'll share my interview experiences for Mastercard, PayPal, and EPAM Systems next.

Hope this helps someone preparing for SDE-2 interviews. 🚀

Amazon #SDE2 #InterviewExperience #SoftwareEngineer #DSA #LLD #HLD #SystemDesign #BackendEngineering

Got Selected for SDE-2 | Tekion

Nikhil Sharma — Fri, 25 Sep 2026 19:01:52 +0000

Happy to share that I recently got selected for an SDE-2 role after going through 4 interview rounds — DSA, LLD, HLD and a Managerial round.

The DSA round had Largest Rectangle in Histogram and Next Greater Element. LLD was probably the toughest round for me, where I had to design and code a TTL-based caching library.

For HLD, I was asked to design a ticket-booking system like BookMyShow. There were several follow-up questions around concurrent bookings, seat locking, handling two users trying to book the same seat, and payment-related edge cases.

Resources that helped me 🙌

DSA — Striver A2Z DSA Sheet

A big thanks to Striver. The A2Z sheet helped me revise important DSA patterns in a structured way and was really useful for my coding preparation. Striver A2Z DSA Sheet

LLD — Shreyash Jain

I followed Shreyash Jain's YouTube content for LLD. It helped me understand how to approach LLD problems, structure classes and apply design patterns.

HLD — Target Trek: Mastering System Design HLD

This book helped me structure system design problems from requirements → APIs → services → database → caching → scaling → edge cases. The real-world system design examples were especially useful during my BookMyShow/ticket-booking HLD round.

Target Trek – Mastering System Design HLD https://www.targettrek.in/book/system-design/hld

Really thankful to Striver, Shreyash Jain and the Target Trek HLD book for the resources. Seeing Selected after all the preparation feels great! 🚀

DEV Community: Nikhil Sharma

Amazon SDE-2 (L5) Interview Experience — India | 2 Years 8 Months

Amazon #SDE2 #InterviewExperience #SoftwareEngineer #DSA #LLD #HLD #SystemDesign #BackendEngineering

Got Selected for SDE-2 | Tekion