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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen·Intermediate

IntermediatePrefer not to say
Jun 2026Remote

Summary

Amazon phone screen for a SWE role, one meaty streaming design problem that ate the whole 25 minutes. Tighter than I expected for a phone screen.

Questions Asked (1)

Q1

Given a stream of reading events with fields (user, book, current position in seconds, total duration in seconds), design a system to detect 'abusive' books, where a book is flagged if more than 20% of its events come from users who jumped to the last 5% of the audio without ever having passed the 10% mark.

System DesignAlgorithms & Data StructuresTechnical Trade-offs
Author's notes

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AI HintsAI Generated

Suggested Approach

Clarify the problem requirements and constraints, then design a streaming solution that tracks per-user and per-book state to identify abusive events. Use a two-pass or streaming aggregation approach to compute the percentage of abusive events per book, and discuss trade-offs between accuracy, memory, and latency.

Pro tip: Emphasize the importance of defining 'abusive' precisely and handling edge cases like users who jump without prior progress, and discuss how to scale the solution using distributed stream processing frameworks like Apache Flink or Kafka Streams.

1. Clarify Requirements and Constraints

Ask questions to understand data volume, latency requirements, and whether the detection should be real-time or batch. Clarify the definition of 'abusive' and how to handle edge cases.

2. Design Data Model and State Management

Define the state needed per user (e.g., max position reached) and per book (counts of total and abusive events). Consider using a key-value store or in-memory state with appropriate partitioning.

3. Process Events and Detect Abusive Behavior

For each event, check if the user has ever passed the 10% mark (using stored state). If not and the current position is in the last 5%, mark the event as abusive. Update user state and book counts accordingly.

4. Aggregate and Flag Abusive Books

Continuously compute the percentage of abusive events per book. If it exceeds 20%, flag the book. Use windowing or periodic aggregation to manage state and output.

5. Discuss Scalability, Fault Tolerance, and Trade-offs

Address how to scale with increasing data (e.g., sharding by book ID), ensure fault tolerance (e.g., checkpointing), and trade-offs between exactness and approximation (e.g., using probabilistic data structures).

Key Points to Mention

  • Stream processing frameworks (e.g., Apache Flink, Kafka Streams) for real-time detection
  • State management: per-user max position and per-book event counts
  • Windowing and aggregation strategies for computing percentages
  • Handling out-of-order events and late data
  • Scalability via partitioning by book ID and parallel processing
  • Trade-offs between memory usage, accuracy, and latency

AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.