Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: four demanding loop rounds

The process started with an online assessment and moved into four rounds: coding, deeper technical design, Leadership Principles, and another design round. The coding interview had two DSA problems, one medium and one hard. I had to solve them optimally, explain my approach, cover time and space complexity, edge cases, optimizations, alternatives, and trade offs.

The design work covered an Amazon like scalable service: APIs, data models, database choices, caching, load balancing, scalability, fault tolerance, consistency, and increased traffic. The bar raiser was behavioral and heavy on Leadership Principles. It used STAR prompts about ownership, ambiguity, customer obsession, conflict, and follow ups on my actual contribution and what I would do differently. The final round was lower level design for an object oriented system with classes, relationships, extensibility, and clean code.

I felt the bar raiser and design rounds were hardest because they demanded detailed reasoning and engineering judgment, beyond correct answers. I did not get an offer. The depth of the leadership probing left me feeling it was harder to recover once I misspoke or stayed too vague.

Location: Bengaluru. Overall feedback: Positive. Offer status: No offer.