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Amazon interview notes, page 82 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 - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Amazon SWE system design round focused entirely on building an in-process pub-sub broker from scratch. The depth of follow-ups on concurrency and delivery semantics made it feel more like a senior design interview than a typical coding screen.
  • Design an in-process publish/subscribe messaging system supporting multiple topics, multiple subscribers per topic, and a subscriber registered on more than one topic.
  • How would you handle concurrency when publishers and subscribers run on separate threads? Walk through your locking strategy.
  • What delivery semantics does your broker provide, and what happens if a subscriber's callback throws an exception during message delivery?
  • How do you prevent a slow subscriber from causing memory to grow unboundedly in the broker?
  • Can you extend this design to support per-subscription priority, where higher-priority subscribers receive a message before lower-priority ones?

“I started with the class structure: a Broker holding a map of topic to subscriber sets, a Subscriber interface with an onMessage callback, and Topic as a string wrapper.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Amazon system design round focused on reviewing an existing architecture rather than building something new. The whole thing was about finding what breaks, what's over-built, and how to fix it without hiring more people.
  • You're handed an existing system. Walk through how you'd identify which components are likely to fail in the next six months, where the design is over-engineered, and what improvements you'd propose without adding headcount.

“This tripped me up more than I expected.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Three behavioral questions for a Software Engineer role at Amazon. Nothing too surprising but the time pressure one tripped me up more than I expected.
  • Describe the biggest challenge you've faced in your work and how you overcame it.
  • Tell me about a time you had to persuade someone or work through a disagreement. How did you handle it and what happened?
  • Walk me through a time you had to deliver something under a tight deadline. How did you figure out what to focus on?

“I had a story ready but it felt a little thin when I actually said it out loud.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026
Amazon interview with a scenario-based question about cross-org resource negotiation. Short but surprisingly tricky.
  • How would you get resources from another organization for your project, assuming that org isn't taking you seriously?

“The second part is what got me.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon SWE coding screen, one easy hash table problem with a handful of follow-ups tacked on. Nothing brutal but the follow-ups had some teeth if you weren't ready for them.
  • Solve a classic easy-level hash table problem such as Two Sum, Contains Duplicate, Valid Anagram, or First Unique Character in a String.
  • How would you adapt your solution if data arrives as a stream and queries can come at any point during ingestion?
  • What changes if the input needs to handle case-insensitivity or Unicode characters?
  • How would your approach change if the input data is too large to fit in memory?
  • Walk through the time and space complexity of your hash table solution versus brute force and sort-based approaches.

“Picked Two Sum because I could write it in my sleep.”

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Amazon·Technical Program Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Behavioral screen for a TPM role at Amazon. Just the one question from what I can tell, classic leadership principle territory.
  • Tell me about a time you made a poor decision, and how a later decision was better because of what you learned.

“I had a decent story ready but I front-loaded too much on the mistake itself and ran out of time explaining what actually changed in my thinking afterward.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
Amazon system design round focused entirely on a file permission and sharing system. Pretty deep dive, they kept pushing on edge cases I hadn't fully thought through.
  • Design a file sharing and permissions system where users can share files with individuals or groups, a home page lists all accessible files, and access is checked on every file request.
  • How would you handle group hierarchies, where groups can contain other groups, in the context of permission checks and index maintenance?
  • What consistency guarantees do you need between a sharing action and subsequent authorization checks, and how would you approach that?

“I started with the data model which felt right, users, groups, files, and some kind of ACL table linking them.”

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Amazon·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon ML Engineer interview with a statistics-heavy question on comparing multivariate distributions across two user populations. One question, but it had a lot of surface area and I felt like I was scrambling to cover everything.
  • You have two groups of users from different regions, each described by a set of continuous behavioral features. How would you test whether the two groups have meaningfully different multivariate distributions?

“This one sprawled in a way I didn't expect.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026
Amazon SWE coding round, one algorithmic problem that looked deceptively straightforward but had a bunch of edge cases I didn't fully work through in time. The structural insight they were probing for took me way too long to see.
  • Given an array of integers where you can only perform two operations (move the first element to the end, or reverse the entire array), find the minimum number of operations to sort the array in non-decreasing order. Return -1 if it's impossible.

“I jumped straight into BFS which felt right, but I didn't stop to think about which arrays are even reachable before coding.”

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Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

May 2026
Amazon product interview, one question about improving Alexa. Pretty sparse on details but the question itself is a classic product sense exercise.
  • How would you improve Amazon Alexa?

“Classic product improvement question and I still fumbled the opening.”

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