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Amazon interview notes, page 150 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·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Amazon system design round focused entirely on low-level infrastructure ownership. One question, lots of follow-ups, and they clearly wanted real war stories not textbook answers.
  • Walk me through a time you owned a storage, distributed systems, or infrastructure component. What was the component, what reliability and performance targets did it have, and describe a specific hard problem you ran into and how you resolved it end to end.

“This question sounds like a standard behavioral but it really isn't.”

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Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jul 2026
Amazon PM loop, all behavioral, every question was a leadership principle deep-dive. Five prompts covering data, constraints, customers, speed, and scope creep. Pretty standard Amazon gauntlet but it moves fast.
  • Tell me about a time you dug deep into data to solve a problem.
  • Describe a time you had to solve a complex problem with multiple competing constraints.
  • Walk me through a situation where you had to deal with a difficult customer.
  • Tell me about a time you had to make a decision quickly without having all the information you needed.
  • Give an example of when you went beyond what was initially asked to fully resolve an issue.

“This one I actually felt okay about.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Amazon system design round for a software engineer role, one big question about modeling an elevator system with multiple cars and a scheduler. Pretty open-ended, which I wasn't fully prepared for.
  • Design the object-oriented model for a multi-elevator system in a building, covering external floor requests, internal destination selection, elevator movement, and a scheduler that decides which elevator handles which request.

“I started with the classes (Elevator, Floor, Request, Controller) which felt solid, but then the scheduler part is where I started rambling.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE coding round, one meaty string problem that branched into a full design discussion. More involved than I expected for a single question session.
  • Given an array of up to 100,000 lowercase strings, return all strings that can be formed by concatenating at least two other strings from the same array. Component strings can be reused. Walk through two implementation approaches, analyze complexity, and handle edge cases like short words, repeated components, and large inputs.

“Started with the hash-set plus DP approach because it felt more approachable.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE coding round with a classic dynamic programming problem. Nothing too surprising but the constraints are real so a naive solution will time out.
  • Given an array of bar heights, compute the total amount of rainwater that can be trapped between the bars.

“Classic problem but I still fumbled the first few minutes trying to remember whether to use the two-pointer approach or precompute prefix/suffix max arrays.”

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Amazon·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026
Data Scientist round at Amazon that was pretty SQL-heavy. One question, clean schema, but the aggregation requirements had enough wrinkles to trip you up if you weren't careful with date functions.
  • Given a table of user watch events with columns for user ID, video ID, minutes watched, timestamp, and subscription type, write a SQL query that returns total watch time in hours per user, grouped by both week and month, for premium subscribers only.

“The filter part is easy, just a WHERE on subscription.”

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Amazon·Machine Learning Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
System design round at Amazon for an ML Engineer role, focused entirely on building a production RAG system for enterprise text. One long question that basically covered everything from ingestion to monitoring, which sounds manageable until you're actually in it trying to not forget half the components.
  • Design a retrieval-augmented generation system for enterprise text, covering the ingestion pipeline, retrieval strategy, prompt orchestration, grounding and citations, freshness handling, latency and throughput targets, privacy controls, hallucination reduction, evaluation approach, and production scaling and monitoring.

“This is basically a full ML systems design question crammed into one prompt.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE online assessment with a ring-distance problem that looks straightforward until you realize they expect O(1) per query, not a fresh traversal each time. Prep-heavy problem with a clean prefix-sum trick once you see it.
  • Given n stops arranged in a ring with weighted edges between consecutive stops, and a stream of (start, end) query pairs, return the sum of shortest arc distances across all queries. Optimize for repeated queries against the same ring.

“The problem is dressed up in some delivery or sightseeing story so it takes a minute to see it's just a circular distance thing.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jul 2026
Amazon SWE coding round with a log parsing problem. Pretty standard algorithmic stuff but the sliding window over per-user event streams tripped me up more than I expected.
  • Given a time-ordered log of user events, find the most frequent length-3 consecutive event sequence across all users. Break ties by lexicographic order and return the sequence with its count.

“My first instinct was to just flatten everything into one big list and slide a window of 3, which is obviously wrong since sequences shouldn't cross user boundaries.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
Amazon system design-ish round where they give you a real team problem and basically expect you to run a mini product-eng session on the spot. More open-ended than I expected for a software engineer role.
  • Given a team-specific business problem, walk through how you'd approach it end-to-end: define success metrics and constraints, generate hypotheses, figure out what data and instrumentation you need, design an MVP experiment with control and variant groups, weigh ML approaches against simpler baselines, and call out risks with mitigations.

“This was a lot to hold in your head at once.”

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