Interview Experience – Amazon (Data Engineer Role) My first round was a mix of DSA + basics. They threw four questions at me: Valid Parentheses, Sort 0s, 1s, and 2s, Maximum Sum Subarray, and Reverse Words in a String. I cracked three with optimal solutions and managed one with brute force (didn’t know the Dutch National Flag trick back then). Then came DBMS concepts and a few Linux commands. I was good with the basics but tripped on grep/sed-level stuff. Honestly, I didn’t expect to make it past this round but to my surprise, I did! Round two was where things got serious. They grilled me on SQL queries group by, aggregates, joins and the whole package. I nailed the first two, gave a partial shot at the tough one, and then smoothly handled DBMS concepts like schema design, OLTP vs OLAP, data warehousing, and data modeling. The final task was a real-life database design scenario, which I actually enjoyed explaining and felt super confident about. By the end, I genuinely thought I had nailed it. But reality check I wasn’t selected. Turns out, they only had one spot and that went to the very first candidate from my college. Life can be a little cruel sometimes, but hey, that’s how it goes. Still, it was a great learning ride. If you’re preparing, make sure you’re solid on DSA (don’t skip optimal tricks!), SQL joins/aggregates, DBMS, and a pinch of Linux.