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Amazon interview notes, page 84 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 Applied Scientist interview that skips the usual warm-up and goes straight into dissecting one of your resume projects. Expect them to keep pulling on the thread until they hit something you can't explain.
  • Walk me through a specific ML project from your resume in detail.
  • What is the unit of surprisal in information theory?
  • Why did you make the modeling choices you did in that project, and how did you evaluate the model?

“No small talk, no 'tell me about yourself.' They picked a project off my resume and just started asking.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026
Amazon SWE online assessment, just one coding problem about finding the top K elements from an array. Pretty standard stuff but the O(n log k) constraint is the whole point of the exercise.
  • Given an integer array of length n and an integer k, return the k largest elements sorted in descending order. Target time complexity is O(n log k).

“The naive sort-the-whole-array approach gets you the right answer but misses the point entirely.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

May 2026
Went through the full Amazon loop, two tech rounds that felt solid, an HR round where I fumbled the DSA problem, and a bar raiser that I thought went really well. Now I'm just sitting here five days post-bar-raiser with no word and genuinely unsure if the weak HR round tanked my chances.
  • DSA problem presented during the HR/recruiter round that required an optimal solution.

“This is the one that's been keeping me up.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Coding / Algorithms

May 2026
Amazon SWE coding round, four problems back to back. Heavy on graphs and classic array tricks. Nothing too exotic but the stream anagram one had me second-guessing my approach the whole time.
  • You're given a list of product pairs where each pair means the two products share a category. Category membership is transitive. Return the total number of distinct categories and the size of each one.
  • Given n courses and a list of prerequisite pairs, determine if all courses can be completed. If yes, output a valid ordering. If not, explain why.
  • Given an integer array, does any non-empty contiguous subarray sum to zero? Just explain the approach, no need to code it.
  • Characters arrive one at a time from a stream. Given a target word, report every position where the last len(target) characters form an anagram of the target. Design it to work online without storing the full stream.

“Classic union-find setup.”

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Amazon·Research Scientist·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon Applied Scientist phone screen for an RS role, centered entirely on a single partition DP problem about batching documents onto GPUs to minimize padding. The interviewer flagged it as a low pass-rate question upfront, which was not exactly reassuring. Brutal if you haven't drilled partition DP before.
  • You have K documents of varying lengths and G GPU batches. After sorting the documents by length, partition them into exactly G contiguous groups to minimize total cost, where each group's cost is its size multiplied by its maximum element. Derive the recurrence, implement the DP, and reconstruct the actual partition boundaries.

“The interviewer nudged me toward G=2 first, which helped.”

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Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Interviewed for a PM role at Amazon. One behavioral question, clearly tied to their leadership principles. Nothing too surprising but it still made me think harder than expected.
  • Walk me through a difficult decision you had to make on a project.

“Amazon loves these.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

May 2026
Amazon behavioral round, one question in, classic leadership principle territory. Not much to go on but it was clearly testing customer obsession.
  • Tell me about a time you went out of your way to do something genuinely customer-focused.

“This is basically the Amazon question.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon SWE coding round with a front-end focused problem. Pretty straightforward on the surface but there were enough moving parts to trip you up if you weren't careful about state management.
  • Build a wishlist feature in vanilla JavaScript that shows 5 product rows initially, each with a toggle button that switches between 'Add to wishlist' and 'Remove from wishlist' states. Also add a 'load more' button that appends 5 more rows at a time up to a max of 30, and display a live row count at the top.

“More to juggle than it looks.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

May 2026
Amazon SWE online assessment, one coding problem about sliding window duplicate detection. Pretty standard OA format, nothing too surprising.
  • Given a stream of integer event IDs in arrival order, determine whether any duplicate ID appears within a sliding window of size k. Return true if such a duplicate exists, false otherwise.

“Classic sliding window dedup problem.”

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Amazon·Machine Learning Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amazon ML Engineer interview with a classic algorithmic problem. Nothing too wild but the optimal approach requires you to actually think it through rather than brute-force it.
  • Given an array of ratings for children standing in a line, find the minimum number of candies to distribute such that every child gets at least one and any child with a higher rating than a neighbor gets more candies than that neighbor.

“My first instinct was some kind of greedy single pass and it was wrong.”

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