← Back to Directory

Amazon interview notes, page 4 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 - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026
Amazon data engineering interview with a pretty deep operational question about annotation pipelines. One round, behavioral-ish but technical enough that you needed real examples.
  • Tell me about a time you worked with data annotators, either in-house or through a vendor. What was the task, what label scheme did you use, and what problems came up around disagreement, annotation quality, or throughput versus quality trade-offs? How did you measure quality and improve it?

“This one hit harder than I expected.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
Amazon SWE interview with an object-oriented design question that was way more involved than I expected. They wanted a full pizza ordering system with class diagrams, multiple design patterns, and a discussion of extensibility and concurrency. Felt like a mini system design session crammed into one question.
  • Design a pizza ordering system with full OOP: customers can customize pizzas (size, crust, sauce, cheese, toppings), add side items, compute total price with multipliers and promotions, and track the order through its full lifecycle from placement to delivery or pickup.

“I jumped straight into classes and started listing Pizza, Order, Customer without thinking about the design patterns first, which made my initial diagram kind of a mess.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Amazon SWE coding round, pretty much a graph theory question the whole way through. They pushed hard on follow-ups so knowing just the basics wasn't enough.
  • Given a directed graph with N nodes and a list of dependency edges, return a valid topological ordering of all nodes, or indicate that no valid ordering exists due to a cycle.
  • How would you enumerate all valid topological orderings of the graph, not just one?
  • Can you modify the solution to always return the lexicographically smallest valid topological ordering?
  • How would you group nodes into parallel execution batches, where all nodes in the same batch can run simultaneously?

“I went with the in-degree queue approach.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Apr 2026
Amazon data engineering interview focused on a large-scale analytics system design problem. The scale involved was genuinely intimidating and the question had enough moving parts to trip you up if you weren't careful about where to start.
  • Design a system to power geographic and demographic dashboards with weekly, monthly, and yearly analytics, given an order item fact table generating 100 million rows per day over 5 years and a customer dimension table with 1 billion rows.

“The scale is what gets you.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026
Round 3 at Amazon was a pure behavioral gauntlet. Four questions with follow-ups, all leadership-flavored. Nothing too surprising for Amazon but the follow-ups are where they actually probe you.
  • Tell me about a time you had to cut scope or simplify a project in order to ship it.
  • Describe your experience leading a team. What did that look like in practice?
  • Give an example of a time you had to make an important decision without having all the information you needed.
  • Tell me about a time you expanded the scope of a project beyond its original goals.

“This one I actually felt okay about.”

View Post

Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Apr 2026
Amazon PM interview with a product design question about one of their more recognizable features. Pretty open-ended, which I wasn't fully ready for.
  • How would you design Amazon's Choice feature?

“I went straight into defining what the badge means to customers and started listing criteria like ratings, price, and shipping speed.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

Apr 2026
Hiring manager round for an Applied Scientist role at Amazon. Three parts: background walkthrough, a deep technical project dive, and two leadership principle questions. Pretty standard structure but the project deep-dive got more intense than I expected.
  • Walk me through your background, including your education, previous roles, and key projects.
  • Tell me about your most impactful project. Go deep on the technical decisions you made, the trade-offs involved, your specific contributions, and what the outcomes were.
  • Describe a time you built or rebuilt trust with a peer, manager, or customer, particularly after a disagreement or setback.
  • Tell me about a time you went out of your way to learn something new to solve a problem or grow as a professional.

“Ran through it chronologically which in hindsight felt a bit flat.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Amazon SWE coding round, one algorithm question about next greater elements in an array. Pretty standard stack problem but easy to fumble if you haven't seen it before.
  • Given an array of integers, for each element find the first element to its right that is greater than it. If no such element exists, return -1 for that position.

“Classic monotonic stack problem.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Got a math/logic question at Amazon that looks deceptively simple until you actually think about it. Short interview, one question, felt more like a quick screen than anything serious.
  • Which is greater: log(120) or log(1) + log(2) + log(3) + log(4) + log(5)?

“Blanked for a second because I was expecting a coding problem.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Apr 2026
Amazon SWE behavioral round, just one question but they really sat in it with you. The whole conversation was basically unpacking one scenario in depth.
  • Tell me about a complex problem you solved with a surprisingly simple solution. Walk through the situation, what alternatives you considered, why you went with the simpler approach, and what the outcome was.

“This one tripped me up more than I expected.”

View Post