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Amazon interview notes, page 158 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 - Multi Round

Aug 2026
Went through the full Amazon SDE-1 loop in Berlin for the recent grad program and got rejected. Four interview rounds plus an online assessment, covering system design, algorithms, a GenAI-flavored coding problem, and behavioral questions. Sharing this in case it helps someone else prep better than I did.
  • You have a warehouse selling items to customers who submit bids. Each customer has an ID, a bid amount, and a desired item count. Highest bidders get served first; ties are broken by round-robin. Return the IDs of customers who received nothing.
  • Design a shopping cart price calculator API: given a list of product IDs, return the total price. Plan for future discount logic and assume this runs at large scale.
  • A rule is an ordered list of match keys like country, brand, and customer tier. Given a table of concrete values with a DEFAULT wildcard, and a query like (DE, acme, silver), return the matching result.
  • How do you use AI tools in your day-to-day work, and what do you do to improve the quality of your prompts or queries?
  • Given the root of a binary tree, return the values visible from the right side, ordered top to bottom.
  • Given a stream of characters of arbitrary length, return the first character that appears exactly once across the entire stream.
  • Tell me about a time you helped a colleague who was struggling.

“This was the online assessment coding problem.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Aug 2026
Took the Amazon SDE intern OA on HackerRank. First coding problem went fine but the second one was some kind of AI repo navigation task and I mostly bombed it, 2 out of 6 test cases. Now just sitting here wondering if that's enough to move forward.
  • What are the chances of advancing to the next round after scoring 2/6 on the second OA problem?
  • How many interview rounds come after the OA for this intern role, and what should I focus on to prepare?

“No real way to know, but 2/6 feels rough.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Aug 2026
Did a one-hour Amazon SDE intern interview that covered project deep-dives plus two coding problems. Came out of it genuinely unsure how to read it, mostly because I fumbled the first question early on and never got to code the second one.
  • Walk me through your recent projects, including any AI or production work you've done.
  • Given piles of candies and k children, find the maximum number of candies each child can get if every child must receive the same amount.
  • In a grid where you can only move to the next column if the destination cell has a strictly greater value, find the maximum number of moves you can make.

“They went pretty deep, not just surface-level stuff.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Sep 2026
Two-round SDE intern loop at Amazon. Round 1 was rough on the DSA side (needed a hint, ran out of time), but the behavioral and project stuff went fine. Round 2 felt much better across the board. Now stuck waiting and second-guessing whether that one bad coding performance is a dealbreaker.
  • Walk me through a project you've worked on in depth.
  • Tell me about a time you demonstrated strong customer focus. Give a specific example.
  • Describe a conflict you had with a teammate or colleague and how you resolved it.
  • What do you know about generative AI and retrieval-augmented generation? How have you worked with or thought about these technologies?
  • Solve a graph traversal problem (hard difficulty, involves a non-obvious algorithmic observation).

“This part went fine, maybe the best part of round 1 for me.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Sep 2026
Went through all four rounds for an SDE1 role at Amazon, and most of it felt solid until the hiring manager round where I got tripped up on the coding problem. Now just sitting here anxious waiting for a result.
  • Multiple leadership principle behavioral questions with follow-ups, covering depth on each scenario.
  • A coding problem presented by the hiring manager, requiring you to clarify requirements and implement a solution.
  • High-level system design discussion related to the coding problem.
  • Explain your GenAI project and walk the interviewer through your work on it.

“Six of these back to back with three or four follow-ups each.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Sep 2026
Got an OA from Amazon recently and it was rougher than expected. The coding portion combined BFS, binary search, and some math trick I barely pieced together, plus there was an AI coding section and a work simulation with leadership principles.
  • Solve a coding problem requiring BFS traversal, binary search, and a non-obvious mathematical insight to arrive at the solution.

“I can handle most mediums on leetcode these days, so I went in feeling okay.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Sep 2026
Went through the Amazon SDE2 loop and got rejected after what felt like a genuinely rough bar raiser round. The other interviews went well enough that the recruiter mentioned some positive signals, but the bar raiser apparently sunk it. Hard to know how much was me and how much was just a bad session.
  • Tell me about a time you identified and improved an existing system or process that was already functioning.
  • Describe a situation where you had to make a difficult decision with limited information or under pressure.
  • Walk me through how you would solve a scheduling or assignment optimization problem where you need to minimize the maximum load across workers given a set of tasks with fixed costs.

“I had actually prepped this exact scenario and felt good going in.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Sep 2026
Took Amazon's online assessment and ran into a stressful situation where the coding question timed out before I could hit save and proceed. My three test cases were passing, so now I'm just hoping the platform auto-saved my work.
  • If a coding question times out during an Amazon OA before you press save and proceed, is your code automatically saved if your test cases were already passing?

“Panicked after the timer ran out and realized I never hit the save button.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Sep 2026
Four rounds at Amazon Germany for an SDE-1 role, and the thing that stood out most was how LP-heavy the whole process was. Roughly 60% behavioral, 40% technical, and the follow-up questions on past projects went way deeper than I expected. Got the offer but still deciding.
  • Design a file system.
  • Leadership Principles behavioral questions (multiple rounds).
  • Dynamic programming problem (asked by the Director in Round 2).
  • Merge Intervals.
  • Coin Change.

“This came from the first round with an SDE and a kernel engineer, so the bar felt pretty specific.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Sep 2026
Went through the Amazon SDE II pipeline and wanted to share how the OA portion went. Two coding problems plus a SpringBoot project, and then some system design and workplace questions. Got a recruiter callback 20 minutes after submitting, which was either a great sign or just their automated system doing its thing.
  • Given an array of 0s and 1s, return the minimum number of swaps needed to sort it so all 0s come before all 1s.
  • Complete two feature tasks inside a provided SpringBoot application (an IMDb-style project) within the allotted time.
  • System design question included as part of the online assessment.

“Easier than I expected for a medium tag.”

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