Amazon interview notes, page 39 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 - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026

Amazon SWE coding round that paired a two-sum variant with a line-intersection problem in what they called an AI-enabled coding session. The main question was dressed up as a movie recommendation problem but it's basically just LC 1 with a flight-duration theme.

Given a list of movie runtimes in minutes and a total flight duration, find two movies whose runtimes add up exactly to the flight duration and return their indices (or runtimes, confirm with interviewer).

“It's two-sum wearing a costume.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Amazon SWE interview with an OOD question about playlists and guides. Pretty focused session, one meaty design problem with a follow-up I didn't fully nail.

Design a playlist system where each playlist contains multiple guides. Implement addGuide (takes a guide ID, user ID, and playlist ID), vote (takes guide ID, user ID, playlist ID, and an upvote/downvote value, both returning void), and getPlaylist (returns all guides in a given playlist sorted by votes descending, with timestamp as a tiebreaker).
How would you extend the system to support different sorting strategies for getPlaylist in the future?

“The core functions weren't too bad to sketch out.”

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

May 2026

Amazon ML engineering interview with a single system design question around ad relevance modeling. Pretty open-ended, which I wasn't fully prepared for.

How would you design a model to predict color preference for sponsored product ads?

“I started with user click data and went straight into feature engineering around dominant colors in product images, which felt right.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026

Took the Amazon SDE1 online assessment for the Vancouver office, passed all coding test cases and answered the work simulation section, then got a rejection email seven hours later with zero explanation. Still not sure what went wrong.

Coding problem in the style of a standard algorithm challenge (similar to problems found on competitive coding platforms).
Back-end code debugging task: identify and fix bugs in a provided codebase.
Work simulation questions based on leadership and workplace decision-making principles.

“Passed all test cases so I don't think this was the issue.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026

Amazon SDE intern OA with a tricky optimization problem that looks straightforward until you actually try to code it up. The problem had a clever twist on splitting deliveries across warehouses to protect items from being discarded.

Given an array of n delivery sizes, distribute items into exactly k warehouses (deliveries can be split across warehouses but a warehouse can only hold items from one delivery) such that after discarding the k/2 warehouses with the most items, the total remaining items is maximized.

“I stared at this for a while before realizing the naive approach of just assigning deliveries directly was obviously suboptimal.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Amazon SWE interview with a data structure design problem that felt straightforward on the surface but had a sneaky efficiency constraint baked in. One question, decent amount of back-and-forth on the complexity side.

Design a class to track users who have logged in exactly once on a shopping platform. The class needs two methods: one to record a login event given a username, and another to return the username of the earliest such single-visit user (or null if none exist). Both operations should be efficient.

“My first instinct was a hashmap from username to login count, which covers the counting part fine.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Amazon SWE interview with a networking/IP problem that looks deceptively simple until you actually read the tie-breaking rules carefully. One question, but it had enough edge cases to keep you busy for a while.

Given a list of IPv4 access-control rules (each with an 'allow' or 'deny' action and a CIDR block), and a target IPv4 address, determine whether the address should be allowed or denied. Longer prefix lengths take precedence, later rules win on ties, and no match defaults to deny.

“The CIDR matching itself isn't the hard part.”

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Amazon·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Technical phone screen for an ML Engineer role at Amazon. One question, pretty deep on neural network architecture fundamentals. Felt okay about it but not sure I nailed the tradeoffs section.

How do convolutional neural networks differ from fully connected networks structurally, why are CNNs more efficient for certain inputs, and when would you actually choose one architecture over the other?

“I started with the structural stuff, parameter sharing and local connectivity, which went fine.”

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Amazon·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Amazon data scientist interview that leaned heavily into streaming algorithms and probability theory. The coding portion felt more like a stats exam than a typical LC grind, which I wasn't fully prepared for.

Implement reservoir sampling for an unbounded stream of user IDs to maintain a uniform random sample of k users in memory. Walk through the time and space complexity, and explain why every element ends up with exactly k/n probability of being selected.
Given an array of integers, return the indices of any duplicate values. You can only use a set and enumerate. The solution must run in O(n) time.

“This one took me a minute to get grounded.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026

Amazon OA for a SWE role, one algorithmic problem about subsequences and circular arrays. Pretty niche constraint setup, took me a while to even understand what they were asking.

Given an array of integers, find the longest subsequence that can be rearranged into a circular array where the absolute difference between every pair of adjacent elements (including the wrap-around from last to first) is at most 1.

“The circular part is what got me.”

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