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Amazon interview notes, page 143 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·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

Jul 2026
Did a PM screen for Amazon and got hit with a curveball about explaining cricket to a complete outsider. Not what I expected.
  • How would you explain cricket to someone who has never heard of the sport?

“I fumbled this more than I should have.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE object-oriented design round focused on a playlist and guide voting system. The whole session revolved around class structure, sort ordering, and extensibility, with a follow-up that pushed toward a design pattern I had to think through on the spot.
  • Design an object-oriented system for playlists that hold guides, supporting addGuide, vote (upvote/downvote), and getPlaylist which returns guides sorted by vote count descending with ties broken by timestamp.
  • How would you extend getPlaylist to support multiple sort orderings beyond vote count and timestamp?

“The core design wasn't too bad once I settled on a Playlist owning a map of guide IDs to Guide objects, with each Guide tracking its creator, timestamp, and vote tally.”

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Amazon·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Amazon ML engineer screen, just one conceptual question about bias-variance. Short and straightforward, nothing too crazy.
  • Can you explain the bias-variance tradeoff?

“Classic question but I still fumbled the middle part.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jul 2026
Amazon OA for a SWE role, one algorithmic problem about array transformations. Pretty niche problem type, not your typical sliding window or DP warmup.
  • Given an integer array, find the minimum number of global replace operations (where every occurrence of value x is replaced by value y) needed to make all equal values appear in a single contiguous block with no interruptions.

“This one took me a while to even understand what was being asked.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jul 2026
Amazon OA for a SWE role, one algorithmic problem about making an array non-decreasing using minimum increments on contiguous subarrays. Pretty tricky once you sit with it.
  • Given an array of server computational powers, you can add a value x to any contiguous subarray. Find the minimum total sum of x values needed to make the array non-decreasing.

“Took me a while to even understand what they were asking.”

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Amazon·Product Manager·Hiring Manager Screen

Jul 2026
Interviewed for a PM role at Amazon, basically just got asked about my background in product management. Pretty standard opener but I still fumbled it a bit.
  • Walk me through your product management experience.

“I rambled.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE coding round, one problem the whole session. The domain hierarchy thing looked like a tree problem at first glance and I went down that path for a bit before realizing there's a cleaner way to think about it.
  • Given a list of domain-score pairs, find all leaf domains (domains that are not an ancestor of any other domain in the input) and return each leaf's cumulative score, which includes the scores of all its ancestor domains that also appear in the input. Return results sorted lexicographically.

“I spent the first few minutes trying to build an actual tree structure and got tangled up pretty fast.”

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Amazon·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Amazon DS loop, and this question basically consumed the entire session. It was a deep optimization and ML design problem dressed up as an ops question, and I was not fully ready for how far they wanted to push it.
  • We used to assign packages to couriers manually. Design a system to do this automatically, optimizing for on-time delivery and fairness across couriers. Walk through your objective function, constraints, required data, algorithmic approach, and how you'd handle edge cases like new couriers, distribution shift, and last-minute volume spikes. Include pseudocode for the full pipeline and explain what happens if the optimizer fails.

“This was one question that just kept expanding.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Amazon embedded interview, one meaty coding question about reimplementing memcpy from scratch. Felt like a low-level systems deep dive more than a typical coding screen, which I wasn't fully prepared for.
  • Implement the C standard library memcpy function: copy n bytes from src to dest and return dest. The buffers may be misaligned and must not overlap. Optimize by aligning the destination to a word boundary first, then copying word-by-word in bulk, and handling remaining trailing bytes separately. Also discuss alignment, strict aliasing, and why memmove exists.

“I started with the naive byte-by-byte loop and they let me finish before asking about performance.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE coding round with a string manipulation problem that looks deceptively simple but has some tricky edge cases once you start working through the examples.
  • Given a string of digit characters representing box IDs, you can repeatedly pick any digit, remove it, increment it by 1 (capped at 9), and reinsert it anywhere in the string. Return the lexicographically smallest string achievable after any number of such operations.

“Spent the first few minutes just staring at the examples trying to figure out what the operation was actually doing in practice.”

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