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Amazon interview notes, page 104 of 159

FAANG / Big Tech

Most of these Amazon write-ups come from Software Engineers (1,092), then Data Scientists (182) and Product Managers (165). The most reported rounds are the technical phone screen (618), the behavioral / leadership round (309), the online assessment (228) and the system design round (159).

1581 interview notes · updated Oct 2026

Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026
Applied for an SDE role at Amazon and got the online assessment within an hour of submitting. Finished the DSA question clean but ran out of time on the AI-assisted coding portion right before submitting, which stings. Felt decent about the behavioral and leadership sections, now just waiting to see if one clean coding question is enough to move forward.
  • Solve a data structures and algorithms coding problem.
  • Complete an AI-assisted coding task within the time limit.
  • Answer behavioral questions based on Amazon's leadership principles.

“All test cases passed on this one, so no complaints.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Behavioral round at Amazon for a software engineering role, pretty much centered on one question about coworker conflicts and the trust principle. Short but not easy.
  • Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker. How did you handle it, and what happened when the solution you landed on didn't work out? Would you have looped in your manager?

“The base question felt manageable but the follow-ups are where I started fumbling a bit.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Amazon SWE coding round, pretty standard stuff. Got a classic dynamic programming/greedy problem and had to work through it under pressure.
  • Given an array of daily stock prices, find the maximum profit from a single buy and sell transaction. If no profit is possible, return 0.

“Classic problem but I still fumbled the first few minutes trying to think of a two-pointer approach before remembering you just track the minimum price seen so far and update max profit on each step.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Interviewed for a management consulting role at Amazon and got hit with a product improvement question about Amazon Go. Pretty light on details from my end but it stuck with me.
  • How would you improve Amazon Go?

“I went straight to the customer experience angle, talked about friction at entry and exit, maybe expanding the store format.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Amazon software engineer loop, mostly behavioral with a decent amount of digging into past projects and how you handle pressure. Nothing too surprising but the timeline questions came in multiple forms which I didn't expect.
  • Give a brief introduction of yourself, focusing on your most recent roles.
  • Tell me about a time you had an extremely tight deadline. What was the situation, what trade-offs did you make, and what did you learn?
  • Describe a mistake you made at work. How did you catch it, tell others about it, fix it, and make sure it didn't happen again?
  • How do you plan and track timelines when priorities keep shifting?
  • How do you communicate risks or delays to stakeholders before things go sideways?
  • Walk me through one project you're proud of in depth. What were the goals, what decisions did you make, how did you measure success, and what was your specific contribution?
  • Which role or position are you most interested in and why?

“Went fine.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026
Amazon OA for a SWE role, one algorithmic problem about rearranging an array to maximize the number of ascending adjacent pairs. Pretty clean problem once you see it.
  • Given an array of integers, find the maximum number of adjacent index pairs where the left value is strictly less than the right value, after reordering the array however you want.

“I overthought this at first and started sketching out some greedy approach with sorting and adjacent swaps.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Jun 2026
Went through the full Amazon SDE II loop in Redmond, applied cold through the portal and got an offer about 51 days later. Four onsite rounds covering coding, system design, and a GenAI-flavored behavioral section, plus a phone screen and OA before that. Everything ran smoothly and the recruiter actually called early to deliver the good news.
  • Implement a binary tree inorder traversal.
  • Design an inventory stock management system, then walk through OOP design decisions, potential bugs, telemetry additions, and how it handles edge cases with dynamic inputs.
  • Design Amazon S3, covering both read and write flows on a whiteboard.
  • Find all anagrams in a string, then extend the solution based on follow-up modifications the interviewer introduced.
  • Decode a string encoded with a specific pattern, then answer multiple deep follow-up questions about the approach.
  • Refactor a Spring Boot backend codebase (with AI assistance allowed) as part of the online assessment.

“Phone screen opener.”

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Amazon·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
SQL-heavy technical screen for a Data Science role at Amazon. One big multi-part query covering window functions, LEFT JOINs, and some tricky edge cases. The kind of question that looks manageable until you're actually writing it.
  • Write a single ANSI SQL query (CTEs allowed, no temp tables) that returns each customer's top 2 product categories by total spend, including ties at rank 2, customers with no orders as a null row, and correct use of RANK() with a specific tiebreaker on earliest order date.
  • Extend the query to add a percent_of_total column showing each category's share of that customer's total spend, ensuring it shows 0 for customers with no orders.
  • Further filter the results to return only customers whose top category's percent_of_total is under 50%, meaning no single category dominates their spend.

“This one took me longer than I'd like to admit to even parse.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Amazon SWE loop, behavioral heavy. Three questions and they all had that classic Amazon flavor where you know what they want to hear but still manage to fumble the delivery.
  • Tell me about a time you had to meet a very tight deadline.
  • Describe a significant challenge you faced at work and walk me through how you dealt with it.
  • Walk me through how you led the development of a new feature from initial concept all the way to shipping it.

“Picked a story that was fine but not my best one.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
System design round at Amazon focused entirely on a locker management system. The question had a lot of moving parts and I felt like I was playing catch-up the whole time trying to cover concurrency and persistence before the hour ran out.
  • Design a locker management system for Amazon Locker OS that assigns the best-fitting available locker when a courier arrives with a package. Define what 'best fit' means, specify core operations, data structures, and analyze time and space complexity.
  • How would you handle concurrency in this system, specifically simultaneous couriers trying to assign lockers at the same time? Address race conditions, idempotency, and fairness.
  • Describe the persistence layer and failure recovery strategy for this locker system. What happens if the service crashes mid-assignment?
  • Write pseudocode for an assign(packageSize) function and a release(lockerId) function.
  • How would you extend this system to support reservations, per-location sharding, priority or SLA tiers, and scaling to many locations?

“I started with the obvious stuff: exact size match first, then upsize if nothing's available, small to medium to large in that order.”

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