Amazon Interview Prep

Amazon’s loop for SDE-2 and above includes 1-2 system design rounds alongside coding and behavioral (Leadership Principles) rounds. System design is evaluated on scalability, availability, and the ability to make clear trade-offs. Amazon values operational excellence - expect questions about monitoring, failure modes, and blast radius.

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HLD Problems Asked at Amazon

#	Problem	Difficulty	Link
1	URL Shortener	🟡 Intermediate	Read →
2	Chat System (WhatsApp)	🟡 Intermediate	Read →
3	Rate Limiter	🟢 Beginner	Read →
4	Notification System	🟡 Intermediate	Read →
5	Distributed Job Scheduler	🔴 Advanced	Read →

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LLD Problems Asked at Amazon

#	Problem	Difficulty	Link
1	Parking Lot	🟢 Beginner	Read →
2	Music Player	🟡 Intermediate	Read →

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DSA Problems Frequently Asked at Amazon

#	Problem	Pattern	Link
1	Two Sum	HashMap	Solve →
2	Merge Intervals	Sorting + Greedy	Solve →
3	LRU Cache	HashMap + Doubly Linked List	Solve →
4	Number of Islands	BFS/DFS on Grid	Solve →
5	Word Ladder	BFS	Solve →
6	Sliding Window Maximum	Monotonic Deque	Solve →
7	Course Schedule	Topological Sort	Solve →
8	Trapping Rain Water	Two Pointers / Stack	Solve →
9	Median of Two Sorted Arrays	Binary Search	LeetCode →
10	Serialize and Deserialize Binary Tree	Tree + BFS/DFS	LeetCode →

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Tips for Amazon Interviews

1. Lead with Leadership Principles. Even in system design, tie decisions back to “Customer Obsession,” “Bias for Action,” and “Ownership.” Amazon evaluates how you think, not just what you design.
2. Discuss operational readiness. Monitoring, alerting, runbooks, blast radius, and graceful degradation are expected in every design answer.
3. Quantify your design. Back-of-envelope math (QPS, storage, bandwidth) shows you can reason about scale. Amazon operates at massive scale - show you understand the numbers.
4. Address failure modes explicitly. What happens when a service goes down? How do retries work? What’s the dead-letter strategy? Amazon interviewers probe resilience deeply.

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