Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen
- What is random forest and how does it select features?
“I knew the ensemble part fine, bagging, multiple decision trees, averaging predictions.”
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
“I knew the ensemble part fine, bagging, multiple decision trees, averaging predictions.”
“The numbers are almost too clean, which made me second-guess myself mid-calculation.”
“This was the one that got me.”
“The core join wasn't bad but the NULL handling follow-up tripped me up a bit.”
“Pretty open-ended, which I wasn't expecting as an opener.”
“I went straight to load balancers and horizontal scaling, which felt right, but I skipped over database bottlenecks entirely until they nudged me.”
“I rambled about meeting stakeholders and reading docs, which felt thin the moment it came out.”
“My first instinct was just BFS and I kind of went with it before fully thinking through why.”
“Threw the words into a set after mapping each character to its Morse equivalent and concatenating.”
“This is pure Amazon LP territory, specifically the frugality angle.”