SDE 2

Two DSA problems in about 90 minutes plus behavioural (work-style) questions. Two 2026 accounts describe a newer format with an AI-related section: working in a code repository, in one case debugging with an AI coding assistant. No account names the exact problems.

Candidates who described this round didn’t name specific questions.

Some candidates had an elimination round before the loop: usually DSA (in one account, two problems in about 45 minutes) followed by Leadership Principles. One older account describes a recruiter call about past work and distributed-design concepts.

1. 1

   Given a string and a pattern, return an array of all the start indices of the pattern's anagrams in the string (example: str = "acbadabcaa", pattern = "aabc" gives [0, 5, 6])

   DSA / Coding

2. 2

   Given an m x n grid of 0 (water) and 1 (land), count the number of islands, where an island is a group of adjacent 1 cells connected horizontally, vertically or diagonally

   DSA / Coding

3. 3

   Count the number of subarrays whose sum is K

   DSA / Coding

4. 4

   Count Stepping Numbers in Range

   DSA / CodingPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)

5. 5

   Capacity To Ship Packages Within D Days

   DSA / CodingPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)

Every account has at least one coding round: one or two DSA problems (graphs, BFS and DFS, heaps, binary search, string matching), with working code expected and complexity cross-questioned, usually alongside 15 to 30 minutes of Leadership Principles questions.

1. 1

   Max Consecutive Ones III

   DSA / CodingPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)

2. 2

   Maximum Profit in Job Scheduling

   DSA / CodingHardPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)

3. 3

   There are N poles of various heights and a machine whose saw blade can be set to a height h: it cuts every pole down to h (shorter poles stay uncut) and you take the cut portions. You must take at least M total length. What is the maximum height h at which the blade can be set? (example: N = 4, M = 7, poles [20, 15, 10, 17])

   DSA / Coding

4. 4

   Design a file-system storage cache: the eviction policy and the data structures for O(1) operations, first storing only file paths and names, then the file content itself

   DSA / Coding

5. 5

   Container With Most Water

   DSA / CodingPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)

6. Show all 14 questions

   1. 6

      Trapping Rain Water (asked as a follow-up to Container With Most Water)

      DSA / CodingPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)

   2. 7

      Cheapest Flights Within K Stops

      DSA / CodingPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)

   3. 8

      Given two employees, find their common ancestors (a graph problem)

      DSA / Coding

   4. 9

      Given an array, find whether you can reach the last index (solved with brute force first, then DP)

      DSA / Coding

   5. 10

      Find a connecting path between flights (a flight booking system scenario). Follow-ups: add weights (costs), then handle the to-from direction (a bidirectional graph)

      DSA / Coding

   6. 11

      Delete a node from a linked list without being given the head pointer

      DSA / Coding

   7. 12

      Merge k sorted linked lists (asked as a follow-up)

      DSA / Coding

   8. 13

      Given a list of nodes in an N-ary tree and a level, return the nodes at that level. Follow-up: nodes can be added and removed dynamically; get the number of nodes at a given level in O(1) time

      DSA / Coding

   9. 14

      Given tasks numbered 0 to n-1 with two kinds of dependencies, mandatory ones that must always be followed and optional ones that each have a cost, find a valid execution order. If the dependencies form a cycle, remove the lowest-cost optional dependency that breaks it and return a valid order; if the cycle is made only of mandatory dependencies, return an empty list

      DSA / Coding

Model a booking, reservation or notification system: classes, relationships and methods, often written as code. Several candidates were told to code directly; interviewers probed extensibility and object-oriented design. One candidate's mixed feedback was put down to not stating requirements first. Two Leadership Principles questions are common.

1. 1

   Design a meeting room booking system

   System DesignReported by 2 candidates

2. 2

   Design a restaurant booking system: the classes and entities (Table, Booking and so on), the APIs and the database schema

   System Design

3. 3

   Low-level design: one class storing the details of a product, with related classes for each specific kind of product, then example code to calculate the total price of an entire order of a set of products

   System Design

4. 4

   Design a system where a customer books a slot at the nearest drop store and physically goes there to drop off a return package (like Amazon Locker, but in reverse)

   System Design

5. 5

   How will you find the nearest drop store from the customer's location?

   System Design

6. Show all 11 questions

   1. 6

      Design a Rate Limiter

      System Design

   2. 7

      Design and code real-time seat booking for BookMyShow

      System Design

   3. 8

      Design Splitwise: users create groups, one user pays and the others split the bill, and users can view balances and settle up

      System Design

   4. 9

      Design Stack Overflow in 30 minutes: the entities, the relations between them, the functions and the APIs (with a UML class diagram and the design patterns used)

      System Design

   5. 10

      Design a highly extensible alerting and notification platform that supports multiple categories of notifications delivered through channels such as email, SMS and push notifications, with the complete data flow from creation to delivery

      System Design

   6. 11

      Design an Alexa-like device that takes a command from a user and passes it to a backend service that processes it

      System Design

A second coding round in three of the loops, with Leadership Principles questions or a resume discussion first.

1. 1

   Some courses have prerequisites (course A must be completed before course B). A student can take at most K courses in each semester. If more than K courses are available, priority goes to the course with the maximum downstream depth. Determine the minimum number of semesters required to complete all courses

   DSA / Coding

2. 2

   Maximum Profit in Job Scheduling

   DSA / CodingPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)

3. 3

   Write a function that, when called, prints the elements whose frequency is greater than k

   DSA / Coding

4. 4

   Remove the nodes on root-to-leaf paths of length less than k (a tree problem)

   DSA / Coding

Every account has a high-level design round, often taken by the hiring manager: requirements, APIs, data model and scaling for a product-like system, with follow-ups on trade-offs and storage. Usually two Leadership Principles questions as well.

1. 1

   Design a system that syncs configuration (settings, default apps, account login) from an old device to a new one (a phone, Alexa or another home device)

   System DesignReported by 2 candidates

2. 2

   Design the Amazon shopping cart, focusing on handling inventory when multiple people buy things at the same time

   System Design

3. 3

   Design a URL shortener

   System Design

4. 4

   Design a system where a third-party service, such as Spotify, uses Amazon Alexa to broadcast or notify users about a newly launched feature (follow-ups on what happens when the device is offline, fallbacks, fault tolerance and product decisions)

   System Design

5. 5

   Design an Inventory Management System for Amazon

   System Design

6. Show all 11 questions

   1. 6

      There is only one unit of a product left in inventory and two users place an order simultaneously. How would you prevent both orders from succeeding?

      System Design

   2. 7

      Design your current AI chat system

      System Design

   3. 8

      Design Yelp (reviews and suggestions for hotels and restaurants), including the APIs

      System Design

   4. 9

      Design an online coding platform like LeetCode (monolith vs microservices, high availability, security, traffic bursts, user experience, storage)

      System Design

   5. 10

      Design a highly concurrent event ticket booking platform, similar to BookMyShow (preventing double booking, optimistic versus pessimistic locking, peak traffic, availability)

      System Design

   6. 11

      Design a Rate Limiter, starting from a single server and scaling to multiple servers (follow-ups: the rate-limit algorithm, whether clients call the rate limiter or the web server, the top three metrics to monitor, what to do if the Redis cluster goes down)

      System Design

Not purely behavioural at this level: most accounts pair Leadership Principles questions (from 10 to 40 minutes) with a DSA or design problem, sometimes open-ended. One 2026 account had the bar raiser as the first round of the loop.

1. 1

   In a group of n people labelled 0 to n - 1, friendships form over time. Given logs where each entry is [timestamp, x, y] meaning persons x and y become friends at that timestamp (friendship is transitive), find the earliest timestamp at which everyone is friends (for millions of data points)

   DSA / Coding

2. 2

   Code a way to find available space to store incoming packages (open-ended: gather the requirements first, then code finding, adding and updating lockers)

   System Design

3. 3

   Design a system that handles audio buffers across different stages at X frames per second

   System Design

4. 4

   Asteroid Collision

   DSA / CodingMediumPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)

5. 5

   How would you optimize memory usage? (follow-up to the stack-based problem)

   DSA / Coding

6. 6

   Find the maximum path sum in a binary tree

   DSA / Coding

7. 7

   Trapping Rain Water

   DSA / CodingPractice on leetcode.com (opens in a new tab)