Amazon Interview Questions — Page 125

Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Amazon behavioral round for a software engineering role. One question, focused entirely on leadership under pressure. Pretty standard for Amazon but the depth they expect in your answer is no joke.

Tell me about a time your team was in serious trouble, like a blocked project, low morale, or a production crisis. What did you actually do to motivate people and get things moving again?

“This is the kind of question where you think you have a good story until you're halfway through it and realize you sound like a bystander.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Amazon coding round, one problem the whole time. The problem looked like a simple sliding window thing but the cost scheduling part tripped me up more than I expected.

You have a binary array of products (0s and 1s) and an integer k. Each operation lets you pick a contiguous subarray of exactly length k, pay a cost equal to its sum, then flip one 1 to a 0 within that window. Find the minimum total cost to eliminate all 1s.

“Took me a while to see why greedy even applies here.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026

Took an Amazon SDE online assessment and got wrecked by a string DP problem. Scored 6 out of 15 test cases, which is not great, and even after talking it through with others I'm still not sure what the intended solution actually is.

Given two strings representing branches of commits, find the minimum number of inversions (conflicts) in any valid interleaving of the two strings, where a conflict is a character with lower alphabetical priority appearing before one with higher priority.

“Completely blanked during the actual OA.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026

Took the Amazon SWE online assessment and spent most of the time fighting the browser IDE instead of actually solving the problem. The debugger was completely broken and the built-in AI assistant was useless.

You are given a broken search API endpoint. Identify the bug and fix it so the search functionality works correctly.

“Lost most of my time trying to get the debugger running.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Amazon SWE behavioral round, two questions back to back on problem simplification. The follow-up about over-complicating things was the one that actually made me think.

Describe a time you took a complex problem and made it simpler. How did you approach the simplification, how did people react, and what came of it?
Tell me about a time you over-engineered or over-complicated something that should have been simple. Why did it spiral, and what did you take away from it?

“I had a decent story ready for this.”

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Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026

Amazon product strategy interview with a classic frameworks question. One question, but it had a lot of surface area and I definitely underestimated how much prep it needed.

Apply a competitive forces analysis framework to a product you've worked on. Walk through each of the five forces, explain how they affected the product, what you did (or should have done) to respond, and whether the model helps you predict where things go from here.

“I picked a product I knew well, which helped, but I got way too deep into one force (supplier power, weirdly) and kind of rushed the last two.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026

Amazon SWE online assessment with a greedy/simulation problem about inventory price adjustments. Pretty straightforward setup but the operation mechanics took me a minute to fully parse.

Given an array of product prices and two integers k (max adjustment per operation) and d (target max price difference), find the minimum number of operations to make the difference between the highest and lowest prices strictly less than d. Each operation lets you increase one price and decrease another by the same amount p, where p is at most k.

“The operation definition tripped me up at first because x and y can be the same index, which felt weird.”

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Amazon·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Amazon Data Scientist interview that was basically a two-sum deep dive with a bunch of follow-ups stacked on top. The base problem sounds easy until they keep pulling the rug out with constraints. Pretty algorithmic for a DS role, which I wasn't fully expecting.

Given an unsorted integer array and a target sum, find the 0-based index pair (i, j) where i < j and the two elements sum to the target. If multiple pairs exist, return the lexicographically smallest one. Expected O(n) time and O(n) space. Justify your approach for duplicate values.
If the array is already sorted in ascending order, can you solve two-sum in O(n) time with O(1) extra space, and does your approach still guarantee the lexicographically smallest pair?
Streaming variant: the array arrives as an unbounded stream and you need to answer online queries asking whether any two seen elements sum to a given value. What data structure do you use, what are the update and query costs, and what are the trade-offs around false positives or false negatives?
The array has hundreds of millions of integers and you're working under a strict 200MB RAM cap. Describe an approach using external memory or hash-based bucketing, and address how you handle negative numbers and integer overflow.
Extend the problem to three-sum on a sorted array. What is the time complexity and how do you deduplicate results?

“I went with a hash map storing the first seen index of each value, which handles duplicates naturally since you only record the earliest occurrence.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026

Amazon OA for a Software Engineer role, debugging a broken Node.js/Express/MongoDB backend for a movie review platform rather than building anything from scratch. The bugs were spread across controllers, middleware, and utilities, which made it way more annoying than a typical algorithmic problem.

A user moderation system needs to permanently flag users after 3 consecutive violations during review creation, 3 consecutive violations during review updates, or 3 cumulative violations across both operations. The existing implementation is broken. Find and fix the bugs.
The rate limiter should block users after 4 combined review operations (both POST and PUT) within a 60-second window, but it's currently not working correctly across endpoints. Debug and fix it.
Reviews containing inappropriate content should be rejected with a 400 response for both create and update operations, but the content moderation check isn't blocking correctly in one or both flows. Fix the issue.

“The consecutive vs cumulative distinction is where I lost time.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026

Amazon SWE coding round, basically a graph cycle detection problem dressed up as a course scheduling question. Pretty standard stuff if you've done any leetcode graph problems before.

Given a directed graph of course prerequisites, write a function to determine whether it's possible to complete all n courses without hitting a cycle.

“Basically course schedule from leetcode 207.”

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