Amazon interview notes, page 65 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 focused on a music player design problem that looked like a frequency-counting exercise but had a nasty scheduling constraint layered on top. Harder than I expected going in.

Design a music player where song play entries stream in continuously as {user, songs[]} pairs, updating per-user or global song frequencies. The player must always play the most frequent song, but a song cannot be replayed within the current cycle. A cycle resets once every distinct song has been played at least once. Define a deterministic tie-breaker for equal frequencies.

“I recognized the frequency-counting angle pretty fast and jumped to a max-heap.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Round 2 at Amazon for a software engineering role was all behavioral. Two questions, both squarely in leadership principles territory, and the kind where you really feel it if your stories aren't tight.

Tell me about a significant mistake you made that negatively impacted your team, and what you took away from it.
Walk me through a time you had to navigate significant ambiguity in a project. How did you handle it?

“This one stings to prep for because you have to pick something real enough to be credible but not so bad it tanks you.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026

Amazon SWE coding round with a combinatorics/optimization problem. Not a lot of context in what was shared but the problem itself was pretty gnarly.

Given a set of servers each with a reliability value and an availability value, find the maximum possible 'stability' of any subset of those servers. Return the answer modulo 10^9+7. For example, with reliability = [1, 2, 2] and availability = [1, 1, 3], what is the maximum stability?

“The modulo part threw me off more than the actual subset logic.”

View Post

Amazon·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Amazon data scientist interview that went deep on streaming systems and real-time event processing. The whole session was basically one long multi-part problem about user session windows, and it got pretty hairy by part three. Not what I expected from a DS role.

Given a day of event-stream data with user enter/exit events per channel, compute the active user count for every 1-minute tumbling window per channel using pandas. Events may be out of order and users may have missing exit events.
For each 1-minute window, return the top 3 channels by active user count with ties broken lexicographically, and include a dense rank per minute.
Design a streaming system that produces the same windowed outputs with event-time semantics, 5-minute allowed lateness, and idempotent/exactly-once processing. Cover state keys, watermarks, late event handling, and long-lived state compaction.
How would you detect and repair clock skew, deduplicate near-duplicate events, and bound memory usage when the active session set spikes? What's the big-O complexity in steady state and worst case?
How do you handle an exit event with no prior enter event, or overlapping sessions from the same user in the same channel?

“The missing exit assumption tripped me up more than I expected.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Amazon SWE interview with a graph cycle detection problem. Pretty standard coding round, not much else to say.

Given a graph, detect whether it contains a cycle.

“Knew the general idea but fumbled a bit deciding between DFS with a visited set versus union-find.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Recruiter / HR Screen

May 2026

Interviewed at Amazon, got asked about career expectations. Pretty light on technical content, more of a get-to-know-you type conversation.

What are your career expectations and what are you most looking forward to in your professional future?

“Pretty standard opener but I still fumbled it a bit.”

View Post

Amazon·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026

Amazon ML engineer interview, one technical question about PyTorch experience. Not much to go on from what I remember.

Walk me through your experience working with PyTorch.

“Pretty open-ended and I kind of rambled.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026

Behavioral round for a quant trader role at Amazon. Just one question from what I can tell, but it was a classic pressure-test type thing.

Describe a situation where you had to make a decision under significant time pressure.

“I blanked for a second and picked an example that was fine but not great.”

View Post

Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

May 2026

Went through the full Amazon SDE loop based in APAC, cleared the OA and phone screen pretty comfortably, had what felt like a genuinely strong set of onsite rounds including a suspiciously encouraging Bar Raiser session, and then got rejected anyway. Stings more because the recruiter basically implied they went with a local candidate.

Describe a situation where you used AI tools in your work.
Design a data structure that supports both lookups and insertions in logarithmic time.
Tell me about a time you prioritized long-term outcomes over short-term gains.
Design an ecommerce entity model and implement two core methods on one of those entities with attention to time complexity.
Tell me about a time you stepped outside your comfort zone.
Tell me about a time when curiosity led to a meaningful outcome for you.

“Had a solid answer prepped for this and the deep dives didn't throw me off.”

View Post

Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Cross-functional / Panel

May 2026

Amazon PM interview with a meaty scenario question about managing a project crisis on a small cross-functional team. One question, but it had a lot of moving parts and I wasn't totally sure where to focus first.

You're leading a three-person team (construction/training, finance, and documentation) to build out a new train station. The documentation owner says the file set is complete, but it was accidentally deleted and the schedule has slipped. How do you diagnose what happened, decide whether to recover or recreate the docs, manage stakeholders, and adjust the timeline?

“I spent way too long on the recovery vs.”

View Post