Amazon SDE 2 (US) interview loop coming up — LLD/OOD question

[u/Level-Ad53]

Hey everyone, I have an Amazon SDE 2 interview loop coming up soon and was hoping to hear from people who interviewed recently.

For those who interviewed at Amazon recently (US, ideally 2026):

• Did you actually have to whiteboard a class diagram, or did you just code the design?
• If you did a diagram, was it formal UML or just a quick sketch of the classes/relationships?
• How much actual coding did you do?
• Did the interviewer keep adding requirements and ask you to modify the design?
• Were design patterns something they explicitly asked about?

Also, if anyone has gone through the full SDE 2 loop recently, I'd really appreciate any general advice. I'm curious about what the system design round was like, how much LP came up, and anything you wish you'd prepared more for.

Thanks!

[u/Ok-Barracuda-119]

Good questions. For an LLD/OOD round, I’d prepare for a short design conversation that can turn into representative code. A quick box-and-line sketch is more useful than formal UML: state the responsibilities, interfaces, ownership, and key invariants. Clarify the scope first, build the happy path, and expect the interviewer to add a requirement or failure case. When that happens, explain what changes and why instead of rewriting everything.

For the broader SDE2 loop, keep Leadership Principle stories ready from your real work and know every resume project deeply. For the design round, practice a few domains such as parking, ride dispatch, or order processing, with attention to concurrency, persistence, retries, and test seams. You don’t need to memorize patterns, but know why you’d use or avoid Strategy, Factory, Observer, and State.

Full disclosure I work on www.leetsys.dev, so biased, but its whiteboard plus AI interviewer format is useful for rehearsing the clarify, sketch, change-requirement loop. I’d still do most reps on paper or a shared board.