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Amazon interview notes, page 50 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

May 2026
Amazon SWE interview with a greedy scheduling problem that had a bunch of follow-ups stacked on top of each other. The core question wasn't too bad but the variants kept coming and I wasn't fully prepared for all of them.
  • You have a daily task limit, a list of required tasks per day, and a shared pool of optional tasks. Each day you must complete its required task, and if time allows you can schedule at most one optional task from the pool (each optional used at most once). How do you maximize the number of optional tasks scheduled, and how do you reconstruct a valid assignment?
  • How would your approach change if each optional task could only be scheduled on its corresponding day, meaning optional[i] is only eligible for day i?
  • What happens when some required tasks exceed the daily limit? How do you handle that edge case?
  • How would you generalize the solution if each day could accommodate up to k optional tasks instead of just one?

“This is a greedy problem.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral round at Amazon for a SWE role, pretty much one question that took up most of the time.
  • Describe a situation where a colleague was struggling to keep pace with the team. How did you handle it?

“I went with a story about a teammate who kept missing deadlines and I had to pick up slack without making it weird.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
System design round at Amazon for a software engineer role. The whole thing was one big question about building a temperature sensor platform at massive scale, and it went pretty deep into areas I wasn't fully prepared for.
  • Design a system that ingests data from up to 10 million temperature sensors distributed across a large geographic region, stores it at 10-second granularity, and serves a near-real-time heat map as well as arbitrary time-range queries (current, min, max) for any sensor. The system needs to stay stable for years.

“This one is deceptively wide.”

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Amazon·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon data scientist case study focused entirely on pricing strategy for a subscription AI product. One big open-ended prompt covering analysis, experiment design, and segmentation. Pretty demanding for a single question.
  • You work on a subscription-based AI video editing product and leadership wants to raise prices. How would you analyze whether the increase makes sense, decide what change to ship and for whom, and design an experiment to measure impact and inform a launch decision?

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

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon SWE interview with a knapsack-style coding problem that kept evolving with follow-ups, plus a behavioral round. The coding portion was more layered than I expected going in.
  • Given an array of items each with a price, and a fixed budget, find the maximum value of items you can purchase without exceeding the budget.
  • Follow-up: what if you must spend the entire budget exactly, not just stay within it?
  • Follow-up: what if each item has a quantity limit on how many times it can be purchased?
  • Behavioral questions about past work experience and how you've handled specific situations.

“Classic knapsack framing.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Did a product design interview at Amazon and got asked about my broader impact on the world as a designer. Short session, one big philosophical question, and I left feeling like I either nailed it or completely missed the point.
  • As a product designer, how do you think about the broader impact your work has on the world?

“I fumbled around talking about accessibility and inclusive design for a bit, which felt safe but also kind of hollow.”

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Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Amazon PM behavioral round, pretty much one question that took up most of the time.
  • Tell me about a time you brought two separate departments together to collaborate more effectively.

“I had a decent example ready but I rambled way too long setting up the context before getting to what I actually did.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon coding round, one problem the whole session. It looked like a graph/greedy thing at first but the right approach turned out to be subset DP, which I was not expecting.
  • You have n feature branches (n <= 15), each containing a sequence of commits, where each commit touches one or more file paths. You can merge the branches into main in any order. The first branch merged has zero conflicts. For each subsequent branch, a commit is 'conflicting' if it touches any file already modified by a previously merged branch (counted once per commit regardless of how many files overlap). After merging a branch, all files it touched are added to the global modified set. Implement a function that returns the minimum total number of conflicting commits across all branches.

“I spent the first few minutes trying to think of a greedy ordering, like merge the branch with the fewest overlapping files first.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026
Amazon SWE coding round, two algorithmic problems back to back. The second one was a tree relationship classifier that started simple and got messier as the interview went on. Came away feeling okay about it but not great.
  • Given an array of integers, find the length of the longest subsequence where any two adjacent elements differ by at most k (a generalization of the classic longest consecutive sequence problem).
  • Given a tree and two node references, determine whether the two nodes are siblings (same parent), cousins (same depth but different parent), or neither.

“I knew LC 128 cold so my first instinct was to just sort and scan, which works fine.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon solutions architect interview, one technical question about networking fundamentals that felt a bit more basic than I expected for the role.
  • What is the difference between a stateless firewall and a stateful firewall?

“Knew this one cold so I just ran through it.”

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