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Amazon interview notes, page 67 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·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon data scientist interview that centered on explaining stats and ML concepts to a non-technical audience, which sounds easy until you're actually doing it live. The whole session felt like a test of whether you can communicate without hiding behind jargon.
  • What is a confidence interval, and how would you explain what it means when presenting results from an experiment to a non-technical audience?
  • What are two limitations of relying only on p-values when evaluating an experiment?
  • Compare bar charts, box plots, and violin plots for visualizing a distribution. What are the pros and cons of each?
  • Can you explain the bias-variance trade-off and how it relates to model evaluation?

“I went with the classic 'range of plausible values' framing and tried to avoid saying 'probability the true value is in here' because I knew that was wrong.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026
Amazon SWE online assessment with an array/algorithm problem involving logistics machine capacity sequences. Pretty niche problem framing but the core idea isn't too wild once you strip away the story.
  • Given an integer array representing machine capacities, the efficiency is defined as the sum of absolute differences between consecutive elements. Find the minimum number of machines you can keep (must keep at least one) such that the sum of absolute differences remains the same. If it's not possible, return the original array length.

“Took me a while to realize that a lot of machines in the middle can be redundant without affecting the total absolute difference sum.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Pre-interview post from someone prepping for an Amazon SDE 1 loop, trying to figure out how much actual working code is expected in the low-level design round versus pseudocode and class sketches.
  • In a low-level design interview, are you expected to write fully functional, compilable code or is pseudocode and sketching out class structures acceptable?

“This is what I'm stuck on going in.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Amazon SWE behavioral loop, all leadership principle stuff. Six questions back to back and by the end I was running out of good stories to tell.
  • Tell me about an important project you delivered under a tight deadline.
  • What obstacles did you face during that project, and how did you get past them?
  • Describe a time you helped a teammate succeed.
  • Tell me about a time you dug deeply into a problem rather than accepting the first explanation you found.
  • Give an example of a time you gave or received critical feedback.
  • Describe a situation where you took ownership of something outside your formal responsibilities.

“Had a decent story ready for this one.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon SWE interview with a bit of a classic bit manipulation problem. Nothing too wild but the follow-ups pushed harder than I expected, especially around correctness guarantees.
  • Given an integer array where exactly one value appears an odd number of times and all others appear an even number of times, write a function that returns that value.
  • Can you reduce the extra space used to O(1)?
  • What are the time and space complexities of your solution?
  • Does your solution still work correctly for very large inputs or negative integers?

“XOR was the move and I knew it, but I second-guessed myself for a minute and started sketching a hash map first.”

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Amazon·Data Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon data scientist technical screen, one meaty coding question about implementing batch gradient descent for linear regression from scratch. Pretty focused session, no fluff.
  • Write Python-style pseudocode for batch gradient descent that minimizes mean-squared error on a linear regression problem, and walk through what each step does.

“I knew the math going in but froze a little when they asked me to actually write it out step by step with explanations.”

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Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Amazon product sense question about building a food delivery app from scratch, think DoorDash or Uber Eats but under the Amazon brand. Pretty open-ended, no hints on where to start.
  • How would you design and launch a standalone Amazon food delivery app, similar to DoorDash or Uber Eats?

“The scope on this one is massive and I kind of froze trying to figure out where to even begin.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026
Amazon internship coding interview with two back-to-back problems. Nothing too wild but the second one definitely has some edge cases that can trip you up if you're not careful about the path-tracking logic.
  • You have two CSV files: one recording when messages were sent by a system, and another recording when they were received by a second system. Both files share synchronized timestamps. For every message that appears in both files, compute and output the latency (receive time minus send time).
  • Given a 2D grid of characters and a target string, determine whether the target string can be formed by starting at any cell and moving to orthogonally adjacent cells, without reusing any cell in the same path.

“Pretty straightforward once you figure out the join key is message_type plus id together.”

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Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Interviewed for a PM role at Amazon and got hit with a product principles question early on. Not a lot to say about the process itself since this was pretty much the whole thing.
  • What are your core product principles?

“Blanked for a second because I'd never been asked to articulate my own principles rather than a company's.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Amazon SWE behavioral loop, four questions back to back all structured around real situations you've owned. The pressure came less from any single question and more from the rapid follow-ups that kept drilling into specifics.
  • Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a peer or stakeholder. How did you handle the disagreement and what happened?
  • Give an example of a project you took full ownership of under tight deadlines. How did you prioritize, reduce risk, and measure whether it succeeded?
  • Describe a time you had to learn a new domain or tool to solve a problem. What drove you to do it, what steps did you take, and what was the result?
  • Walk me through a situation where rapid follow-up questions put you under real pressure. How did you stay clear, communicate trade-offs, and adapt on the fly?

“I had a decent story ready but partway through I realized I was making myself sound too right and the other person too wrong, which is a trap in these.”

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