Amit Kumar

SDE & SDE-2 at Amazon was no easy feat😕 The biggest challenge? The intense preparation. Everyone I spoke to, from seasoned engineers to interns, all agreed - Amazon and other tech giant's interview bar is high. It's enough to make anyone question their abilities. With this, my initial excitement quickly turned into self-doubt. But through months of preparations with consistency (because without it you can't prepare) I cracked Amazon. The journey was not simple and easy with a full-time job. However, I scheduled a few hours after work for preparation—working on coding challenges and whiteboard sessions daily. I focused on areas that aligned with my target role, like development and system design. Connecting with professionals working for the same role, gave me invaluable insights into the interview process and company culture. At last Every. Single. Second. Was. Worth. It. I know many working professionals face the challenge of finding time to prepare for interviews. Platforms like Tutort Academy specialize in upskilling and providing hands-on experience, making it easier for working professionals like you to prepare for upcoming interviews. Explore more-https://bit.ly/3V9JfDZ Up till now, they have helped 1250+ professionals successfully land a job at their dream companies like Google, Microsoft, Walmart, Amazon, JP Morgan, and more by providing, the right career guidance that includes- --100% Live Interactive sessions --1:1 Personalized Mentorship from MAANG mentors --Mock Interviews, Resume sessions, LinkedIn profile Optimization, and more. So, go out there, conquer those interviews, and achieve your goals! #sdeinterview #techcareer #tutortacademy #amazon

858

13 Comments

Day 16 of 30: Motu and Patlu's S3 Samosa Storage Sorting Saga 🏪🥟 Today, our cost-conscious friends Motu and Patlu are diving deeper into Amazon S3 Storage Classes. Let's see how they organize their expanding samosa empire's data: Motu is scratching his head 🤔, looking at his S3 bill. "Patlu, storing all these samosa recipes and customer orders is costing more than our ghee budget! Isn't there a way to organize this better?" 💸 Patlu's eyes gleam with excitement 🤩, "Motu, my frugal friend, what we need are S3 Storage Classes! It's like having different types of storage containers for our samosas. Let me explain!" 📦 1. S3 Standard: 🌟 Patlu begins, "S3 Standard is like our main display case. It's for our fresh, popular samosas that customers buy every day. It's the most expensive, but it's also the quickest to access." Motu nods, "Ah, so we'll use this for our current menu and recent orders!" 📜 2. S3 Intelligent-Tiering: 🧠 "Next, we have S3 Intelligent-Tiering," Patlu continues. "It's like a smart fridge that moves samosas between the front and back based on how often they're ordered. It automatically moves data to the most cost-effective tier." Motu grins, "Perfect for our seasonal specials that might become popular suddenly!" 🍂🌞 3. S3 Standard-Infrequent Access (S3 Standard-IA): 🔄 Patlu explains, "This is like our backup refrigerator. It's cheaper to store samosas here, but takes a bit longer to retrieve. Good for recipes we don't use often but might need quickly." "Like our Diwali special samosas?" Motu asks. 🪔 "Exactly!" Patlu nods. 4. S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access: 📍 "This is similar to Standard-IA, but stored in only one location," Patlu says. "It's like keeping backup recipes in just one branch. Cheaper, but riskier if that branch has a problem." Motu looks worried, "Maybe for things we have copies of elsewhere?" 📝 5. S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: ❄️⚡ Patlu continues, "Think of this as our cold storage. It's much cheaper, but takes a bit longer to access. Good for archived order data we might need for audits." "Ah, for last year's sales records!" Motu exclaims. 📊 6. S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval: 🧊 "This is like our deep freezer," Patlu explains. "Very cheap storage, but it takes hours to retrieve data. Perfect for old recipes we rarely use." Motu nods, "Like great-grandma's secret samosa recipes!" 👵📜 7. S3 Glacier Deep Archive: ⏳ Patlu concludes, "This is our longest-term storage. It's like burying a time capsule of samosa history. Extremely cheap, but takes up to 12 hours to retrieve." At the end of the day, Motu is excited about optimizing their S3 storage costs. 💰 Patlu sums up, "By using the right storage class for each type of data, Motu, we can significantly cut our storage costs while keeping everything we need. It's all about putting each samosa in the right container!" 🥟📦 Stay tuned for our next AWS adventure with Motu and Patlu! 🚀 #awsWithMotuAndPatlu

2

1 Comment

Senior developers can stay connected to the codebase, provide productive hands-on experience, maintain updated technical skills, and remain highly productive even without coding regularly. However, over time, not writing code or delivering key features can lead to a sense of moral high ground because they are not involved in meeting strict customer deadlines. On a personal note, I get little to no time to write code, but I ensure to contribute to at least one project per quarter, just for the love of it. It is one of the few job profiles that allows individual contributors to operate at such top levels. Making the most of it. Regardless, interesting read.

12

Few people join as a SDE-1 and within a span of ~7 years, they promote to a very senior level(L6 equivalent to Staff Role) in a company whereas same achievement is hard to realize when you're switching companies. So, what makes these employees so special? A few points: - They joined these companies as SDE-1 - Implemented projects end to end - very pro-active in all things: reviews/discussions/coding. - highly biased for taking actions (critical skillset for growth) - were lucky enough to some extent in getting good projects - were hard working enough to find optimizations & propose as new projects in the product - filled with lots of motivation & drive: showing true ownership at the deepest level one could possibly imagine Staying in a company helps you build context over the years, which the lateral hires within few months might or might not be able to grasp. This post is just a reminder: Switching would probably make money but staying in a company with a little bit of luck can do wonders(both money & role). PS: I did 2 switches in my career and I can relate with this post.

550

12 Comments

I’m shocked by the big layoffs at Intuit, and it's even worse that they called out over 1,000 people as low performers. I bet most of them never even got a poor rating before. One of my friends is also impacted by this layoff, which is very much disheartening. If you are impacted; We have some openings at InMobi, Please check out these opportunities and let me know if you’re interested. 𝐃𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐚𝐥 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬: 1. SDE-2 Android: https://lnkd.in/gP5wTQ3J 2. SDE-3 Android: https://lnkd.in/g4kUw-d9 3. SDET-2: https://lnkd.in/gEhX5tPK 4. SDE-3 Backend: https://lnkd.in/gaV4Wwvu 𝐄𝐱𝐩𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐌𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐎𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬: Visit the InMobi career page to find other positions that match your profile. If you see a role that suits you, share the details with me, and I’ll gladly refer you. #layoff #intuit #recession #opportunity #opening #refer

131

15 Comments

Today, the entire country witnessed why System design interviews should be given more importance than DSA.  Hope the companies realise the need is scalability, high performance and not traversing a graph. 🥲 #Coldplay #Bookmyshow #SystemDesign

401

18 Comments

Dhoni! The nightmare to Hotstar and Jio Cinema. At the end of this post, I have two links where the Hotstar and Jio executes tell us why Dhoni makes their life so interesting and so difficult. Don't miss to watch. The problem is traffic. Dhoni can take it to astronomical levels. One common solution to this problem is autoscaling. But... hmm... that just does not do magic. Autoscaling does not work when there are traffic spikes i.e., sudden increase in taffic. For prominent cricket matches, hotstar observes spikes of about 1M users per minute adding to the number of active users. A star batsman gets out and the traffic drops by several millions in that minute. This kind of spike is harmful for backend services. Funny problem for hostar is that if users press the back button (instead of just closing the browser), the traffic goes to home page. If homepage was configured for lesser traffic, it gets into trouble. There could be more challenges. What if AWS has no capacity (in a specific AZ) to provision servers to you? So, autoscaling does not always work. Say, you use step-wise scaling, i.e., say, 10 servers at a time with the objective to scale up to 800 from 100. This is too slow. 1 M requests per second, 10 TB of video bandwidth per second (75% of total internet bandwidth available in India) - These numbers are mind boggling! Even the ISPs can get choked delivering this kind of traffic. Streaming services face these challenges all the time. Royal wedding, IPL finals, Trump's activities, and so on. How do you prepare the platform for such spikes? Hotstar uses 3000 machines with 36 CPUs and 72GB RAM, spread across different regions, just to generate the load that hits the platform for load testing. The testing they do to face the spikes is called "Tsunami" testing. A breaking point is calculated for each service. This number is then used to decide the scale of infrastructure. How to solve this problem, then? 1) Use buffer to account for spikes.  2) Pre-warm the infrastructure. So, the uptime is low.  3) Find the right metrics on which scaling can happen "anticipating" a spike, not after a spike has happened. For example, when drinks break ends, expect high load.  4) Use a variety of EC2 instance types. This diversity (memory intesive, compute optimized, etc) can save you if the change in traffic pattern requires a specific resource type.  5) Decide which of your services are P0 and which are less important. Upfront declaration such as that would allow you to reduce resource usage on less important services (and make them available for P0 ones). For example, movie recommendation service is less important than live video delivery esp., when Dhoni is batting. Finally, I note that hotstar and Jio prepare harder for IPL finals than our cricket teams! Watch talks: https://lnkd.in/gkUx27hS and https://lnkd.in/gME-RkxV

18

1 Comment

“SDE ke liye system design aata hai” 🤔 Yes, they do ask. It’s often assumed to be something only senior engineers need to know, but many companies now include it in their interviews, even for junior and mid-level roles. If you’re preparing for an SDE interview, make system design part of your plan along with DSA, behavioral questions, and mock interviews. <> Start with the basics Understand the fundamentals of scalability, latency, throughput, and availability. You don’t need to be an expert, but knowing how these work and where to use them is crucial. <> Practice simple use cases Start with smaller problems like designing a URL shortener or a rate limiter. These are often asked in interviews and help you build confidence. <> Mock interviews Practice with peers or mentors. Even if you don’t know everything, explaining your thought process clearly can leave a good impression on the interviewer. Don’t brush it off as irrelevant—it could be the one thing that sets you apart. And if you're looking to boost your interview skills and achieve your career goals, consider Tutort Academy. Explore here-https://bit.ly/3CGlk9U The platform has helped over 1250 professionals like you to switch and crack top PBC, by offering 1:1 mentorship, mock interviews, resume-building sessions, salary negotiation tips, 100% Live interactive sessions from MAANG Mentors, and more they can also help you by joining their new batch start from 24 November, Sunday🚀 Don't waste your time start your preparation now. #interviewtips #sdeinterview #amazon #dreamcompany #upskilling #tutortacademy

220

1 Comment

A post by X user Naveen Kopparam has gone viral, revealing that a dosa seller near his home earns over ₹20,000 daily, totaling ₹6 lakh a month, and takes home ₹3-3.5 lakh after expenses—all without paying income tax. This sparked debates on social media about the disparity between vendors and salaried employees in India. Kopparam noted that while the vendor pays no taxes, a salaried employee earning ₹60,000 monthly pays 10% as tax. The post raised broader concerns about income tax policies and tax evasion, with users questioning similar practices by professionals like doctors and traders. #ViralPost #DosaSeller #StreetFoodIndia #SocialMediaDebate #IndiaEconomy #EarningsDisparity #SmallBusinessStories #marketinggrowmatics #smallbusiness #smallbusinessowner #startups

1

You can succeed in your career even if you messed it up. I published a latest edition of my newsletter which showcase how I still got promoted despite bringing down Amazon Prime 1-day delivery promise. Yes, it was my bad code. Here are the key takeaways: 👉 Build trust by being a go-getter and meeting leadership expectations, and they'll support you in tough times. 🙌 Always learn from your mistakes, take the lead, set examples, and come out stronger. 👌Build trust with business leaders, keep them informed, and help them achieve their goals. ❤️ Strong leadership is a blessing. If you have supportive leaders, maintain lifelong relationships and strive to become a similar leader. If you want to read the full article, the link is in the comments.

5

1 Comment

Recently I completed 10 yrs in the Software Industry ! I started my software journey as SDE-1 on 24-June-2014 and exactly 10 yrs later on the very same day 24-June-2024, guess what ? I got the offer from Confluent for the Staff SDE role. I believe in happy coincidences and this one definitely tops my list so far - will be cherished for a long long time. Harnessing the Power of Manifestation can be a great tool to achieve what you want but there's no simple trick. The only thing you can do best is to keep going. And the only way to go fast, is to go well. Interviews have become really challenging. Some companies are still stuck with typical Leetcode DSA problems and same old System Design questions while others have moved on and they really test your skills in a good way (and again you may find that easy or tough depending on your overall skillset). I never did crazy amount of leetcoding because there are better things in life to do but if you love leetcoding, please do; there's no harm. But do understand, it will never help you hop from SDE-1 to SDE-2 to Senior to Staff within or outside the company. Because the business coding is far different from your DSA coding and for getting promoted from level L to level L+1, it requires a lot of depth and breadth in your work and 10+ other things. While I can't write about those 10+ things in a single post today, I can only give you a flavour by saying - "When we hire Directors, we want them to be technically solid (one who can code) and when we hire Senior/Staff Engineers, we expect them to be leaders who can hone the skills of other people, lead them and showcase people management too or deal with different stakeholders and influence them, align them" For cracking Staff roles, you need to be super-solid with Multi-Threading (making a thread-safe distributed API, having a sound knowledge of semaphores, mutexes, condition variables, etc. and implement them with a running code within 40-45 min), Code Design (with the expectation that it runs in your IDE), System Design (HLD, LLD) and Technical Breadth and Depth (explain your projects to demonstrate scope, complexity/ambiguity, innovation, challenging status-quo and org-level or company-level impact). So, I'll start with Coding, I had implemented around 10+ Code Design Problems with Multi-Threading myself which runs on IDE timeboxing to 45 min such as - Rate Limiter, Router, LRU & MFU Cache (with multi-threading), Bounded Buffer problem (Producer-Consumer), IP Blocklister, etc. before going for interviews (might share them later on) and did some 225 odd leetcode questions just to get back to my coding speed (where I can code and run 2 Medium Complexity problems or 1 Medium + 1 Hard in 40-45 min). Here's my GitHub Repo for those 225 Leetcode problems that I solved a few months back incase people wanna refer to the problems or their solutions https://lnkd.in/gfNmrPRA PS : A happy pic below to flirt with Linkedin Algo 🤣 

1,055

86 Comments

Swiggy eyes up to $12.7 billion valuation for mega $1.4 billion-plus IPO; launch likely in early November (caution: 70% is going to bank accounts of existing investing only 30% is going into business development)

1

Know your abilities! Maturity is not about doing more! It's also about having clarity on what you can do and what you can't! For example, Imagine someone got a Job at a top product company whose interview process involves DSA and System Design. I have the clarity that I am not aware of those and won't be able to learn them overnight, it's a long process. So I spend little to no time worrying about it! Things will improve for you if and only if you know your abilities. #lifeadvice #career #mindset

5

Queues are a poor fit when the sender needs a response. When I was working in Amazon, so we were using a service to send Emails, which was using SQS Queue for processing all request. So for every failure they were sending those request to Failure Queue. Now the problem is there is no way of acknowledgement for sender to know if email was delivered to recipient or not. One of way was to subscribe to their Queues to know which request got failed. But this was not good thing to do because messages were not seperated by services as such, so with just queue, it was not technically correct thing to do. Also this way everyone will get access to every data which is flowing through those queues. And since that team was running their entire infra in different AWS account, all sender service will require permission to access those queues, which is a security issue.

4

I am an SDE 3 and System Design played a crucial role for me in landing this job. And coming from a Service Based → Product company it was a bit hard to master it. However since it’s frequently asked for senior roles, I made sure to prepare it by studying the major questions to cover all types of Designs! Huge thanks to Bosscoder Academy for compiling this list of projects now one can practice for System Design interviews ! Check here: https://bit.ly/4djlyRF This guide contains → ✅ List of System Design Projects you can create from Basic to Advanced level i.e. from URL Shortener to Food Delivery apps like DoorDash Save this doc and share it with your friends 📃 #SystemDesign #ad #sponsoredpost

213

28 Comments

From SDE 1 ➡️ SDE 2 at Amazon✨ The journey has been amazing. “I really loved solving problems that were not just a Google search away, and wished to explore various technologies and that's why I decided to get into a product-based company. Here’s how I did it: I started with Data structures and Algorithms. For this, I practiced topic-specific questions on LeetCode and built a strong understanding of advanced concepts like; DP, Graphs, etc. Moving forward, I shifted my focus to System Design covering both LLD & HLD in depth. For this, I practised a lot of Design questions mainly to build my skills, for example- → How to design a chat app like WhatsApp? → How to design a Weather app? etc. Lastly, I started building my Resume, I believe it’s as important as technical preparation. 🔥Remember, 𝗣𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗸𝗲𝘆 - It took me “months” to get the right job. So, do not settle for the wrong one. And Don’t give up!! Now if you’re someone who wants to make a switch to a product-based company, I would suggest you, explore Bosscoder Academy here: https://bit.ly/3JRKqTr They can help you with : ✅ Structured curriculum to learn problem-solving in DSA, System Design and Full stack development. ✅ Personal Mentorship from industry experts. ✅ Live Classes & 24/7 Doubt Support. ✅ Real-life, relevant projects with Placement Assistance 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗶𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝘄𝗮𝘆𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗦𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲!! 💪 #career #collab #linkedincommunity

722

11 Comments

Famous SDE, EM behavioural question, "how did you work with cross-functional teams" is not about working. It's also not about the tools you use to work together. It is actually about handling vested interests. Why? Before that, lets first understand what is a cross-functional team. These are teams made of people from different functional expertise. For example, Product Manager, Developers, QA, UX, all in one team to solve a business problem. 3-4 developers + 1-2 PM + 2 QA + 1-2 UX Although these individuals are part of this team, but their managers are not same (in most of the cases). Meaning they are still reporting to their managers of their specific functional team. This is where challenges start to show. Each of these have their vested interests. Dev :- Use the latest and shiniest tech QA :- Make the entire product release a bug PM :- Keep squeezing in more and more features UX :- Become the most frustrated user of the product Shouldn't this lead to a better product? No, because while the team is cross-functional, they are only focused on their specific functions, instead of the specific problem because of which they all came together. Cherry on top is their managers are not same. So, how do you handle this situation at work and answer it in interviews. [1] If anyone deviates from original business problem due to their "best functional knowledge", bring them back by going back to business problem. [2] Communicate like you are talking to a 5 year old. Most of the problems start because we assume communication already happened and everyone is aware of the decisions. [3] Keep communication in written, you don't want to hear later, "oh, I meant that..." [4] Give respect to get respect. Escalate about those who keep disrespecting others. [5] If people disagree, understand where they are coming from. Try giving reasoning behind your stand with data. [6] After disagreement if the final decision in not in your favor, don't take it personally. [7] And finally, talk confidently, explain logically. Projects don't fail due to technology, they fail due to people. It gets worse, when people have vested interests with different reporting. If organisations wouldn't have people problem, then many of you and I won't be having the job we have today (we wouldn't need so many people at workforce). That's why behavioural interview are not hypothetical. They extract the best and worst of you from your own stories and serve it in a platter to interviewer. Need help with difficult behavioural interview questions? DM me COACH.

47

12 Comments

Imagine you are developing a new feature for Amazon and your PR leads to a PROD crash during its Big Billion Day sale! 🦀 It would actually cause Amazon a loss of a few million dollars easily by the time PROD recovers. 💸 The easiest solution for tech companies for such critical events is CODE FREEZE. 🔐 No new code will be moved to PROD a few days before a major event. This helps in having a stable binary running on PROD for sometime before the event so that it is thoroughly tested and no surprises can be expected on that. 😲 There are many other ways to improve system health like feature flags, additional release environments, gradual rollout, etc. but so far in my experience code freeze is one of the simplest and underrated one. 😍 Every year when there are holidays during Christmas and Thanksgiving when there are less developers available, code is usually put under freeze because who would debug it then if something went wrong? 🤙 The lead engineer who made the change is sipping a margarita on a beach! 🏖 Imagine a company like Hotstar or JioCinema crashing during World Cup finals or IPL finals because someone thought a flying 6 sticker would be a cool feature to add but instead they added a bug with their change. 🏏 Does your company have code freezes? If yes, when? What's the system health philosophy there? 💡

151

12 Comments

🎉 radha radha .... its great to share with you all the detailed LLD (Low-Level Design) of building a nested and multilevel accordion! 📐🔧 If you're curious about how this is crafted and want to delve deeper into the process, drop a comment below! 👇 Your interest will guide me in creating a comprehensive video tutorial to walk you through each step. Let's unlock the secrets of accordion creation together! live link: https://lnkd.in/g5yt-DtE #AccordionDesign #NestedAccordion #MultilevelAccordion #TutorialRequest

15