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Amazon interview notes, page 149 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·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE interview that went deep into graph DP, the kind of question where you think you're done and then they keep pulling threads. Walked out unsure if I nailed it or just survived it.
  • Given a directed acyclic graph with N nodes and M edges, a source node s, and an integer L, design a 2D DP solution dp[u][k] that counts the number of distinct paths from s to u using exactly k edges. Walk through the state definition, base cases, transition, and iteration order.
  • What are the time and space complexities of your DP solution, and how would you reduce space usage using rolling arrays?
  • How would you adapt this DP framework for weighted edges, for example to find the shortest or longest path using at most or exactly k edges?
  • How would you modify the solution to count paths specifically to a target node t rather than all nodes?

“I knew topological sort was involved but fumbled the base case explanation for like two minutes.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026
Went through a behavioral round at Amazon for a software engineer role. Pretty standard stuff, all leadership principle territory. Nothing technically deep but I left second-guessing a couple of my answers.
  • Can you introduce yourself and walk us through your background?
  • What draws you to Amazon specifically?
  • Tell me about a time you received critical feedback and how you handled it.
  • Describe a situation where you had to pick up something unfamiliar quickly and put it to use.
  • Walk me through a time you missed a deadline and what you took away from it.

“Fine, nothing to report.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE coding round, one meaty algorithmic problem that took up basically the whole session. The question was deceptively clean on the surface but the complexity and edge case requirements made it a real grind.
  • Given an integer array called priorities, compute delay[i] for each index i, where delay[i] is the distance to the rightmost index j (j > i) such that priorities[j] is strictly less than priorities[i]. If no such j exists, delay[i] is 0. Implement this in better than O(n^2) time, explain your complexity, and handle edge cases like duplicates, fully increasing arrays, and fully decreasing arrays.

“The brute force came to me in about 30 seconds and I almost just said it out loud before catching myself.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE interview with two coding problems. The second one was a custom graph/BFS hybrid that felt way harder than anything I'd seen on LeetCode.
  • Rotting Oranges (LeetCode 994): given a grid of fresh and rotten oranges, find the minimum time for all oranges to rot via BFS spread, or return -1 if impossible.
  • You're given start and end coordinates on a grid, a maximum total walking budget k (measured in Manhattan distance), and a list of bus stations connected as a bidirectional graph where riding the bus is free. Can you get from start to end if walking between any two points costs Manhattan distance and your total walking must stay within k?

“Fairly standard multi-source BFS.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE object-oriented design round, one big question about building a credit card system from scratch. Felt like a lot to cover in one session and I definitely left some threads hanging.
  • Design a simplified credit card system using object-oriented principles. Define the core classes and interfaces, describe the main workflows for charging, refunds, billing, and payments, and discuss how you'd extend the design for something like multi-currency or fraud detection.

“This one sprawled fast.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE coding round with a classic array problem. Nothing too wild but the O(1) space constraint is where people trip up if they haven't seen it before.
  • Given an integer array, return a new array where each element is the product of all other elements in the original array. You cannot use division, and you must do it in O(1) extra space (not counting the output array).

“The no-division rule is obvious enough but the O(1) space thing is what actually bites you.”

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Amazon·Data Scientist·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jul 2026
Amazon Data Scientist case question about choosing between vendor and in-house training platforms. Pretty classic build-vs-buy framing but with enough dimensions (cost, security, flexibility, timeline) that it actually took some real structuring to not just ramble.
  • Your company needs to roll out an employee training platform and is weighing three options: a standard vendor package, a premium customizable vendor package, or building it in-house. Compare all three across cost, implementation time, data security, and long-term flexibility. Which would you recommend, and what additional information would you want before committing?

“I spent too long on the cost dimension and kind of rushed the security piece, which I think was actually the most interesting angle for Amazon specifically.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE coding question, one problem, pretty algorithmic. The problem looked deceptively short but took me a while to fully wrap my head around what was actually being asked.
  • Given an unsorted array of size n and an integer k, consider all subsequences of size n-k. For each such subsequence, sort it and find the maximum difference between consecutive elements. Return the minimum of those maximum differences across all valid subsequences.

“Took me an embarrassingly long time just to understand what they were asking.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE online assessment with a string/prefix problem that looks deceptively simple but has a tricky frequency-equality constraint baked in.
  • Given a string of uppercase letters, for each prefix compute the maximum number of equal-length contiguous blocks such that every character appears the same number of times in every block.

“The problem statement reads cleanly but I kept second-guessing the frequency constraint.”

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Amazon·Data Scientist·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026
Amazon Data Scientist behavioral round, heavy on ownership and cross-functional influence. One big question that basically ate the whole session.
  • Walk me through a difficult problem you solved from start to finish where other people pushed back on your approach. Cover the business goal, what obstacles you hit, what you actually did, the results, and specifically how you got the rest of the organization to adopt the solution.

“This question is deceptively wide.”

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