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Amazon interview notes, page 92 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·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026
Amazon OA for a SWE role, one algorithmic problem about guard placement and maximizing protected population. Pretty niche greedy/simulation problem, not your typical LeetCode fare.
  • Given n cities with population values and a binary string indicating which cities have a guard unit, find the maximum total population you can protect. Each guard can move at most one step to the left (or stay), and a city is protected if it has at least one guard after all moves.

“Took me a while to even parse what they were asking.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Amazon behavioral round for a software engineering role. Four questions, all leadership principle territory. Nothing technically hard but you really need concrete stories ready or you'll be fumbling mid-answer.
  • Tell me about a complex problem you solved with a surprisingly simple solution.
  • Describe a situation where you had to convince a peer who disagreed with your approach to a shared goal.
  • Give an example of a project where you had to choose between doing things the right way and shipping on time.
  • Walk me through a time you delivered something under serious time pressure. What did you cut, and how did you handle the risk?

“This one tripped me up more than it should have.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026
Interviewed for a solutions architect role at Amazon and got hit with a classic system design question about three-tier architecture. Short session, not much fluff.
  • How would you design a three-tier architecture?

“I knew this one cold, or thought I did.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Amazon BI Engineer interview with a SQL question focused on ranking customers by daily purchase volume. Pretty straightforward scenario but the window function angle is where they're really testing you.
  • Given a table of prime membership date ranges and a table of orders with daily quantities, write a SQL query that returns, for each calendar day, the customer(s) with the highest total quantity sold. Handle ties by returning all tied customers.

“The aggregation part is fine, group by day and customer and sum the quantities.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Amazon SWE coding round with a single DP problem that looks deceptively clean until you actually try to implement it. The two-handler job scheduling problem took me a while to see the right state representation.
  • You have a list of jobs (each with a type) and two workers. Each worker picks up jobs in the original order, but you can split the list between them however you want. Processing a job costs a 'long' time if the worker's last job was a different type (or they haven't worked yet), and a 'short' time if the last job was the same type. Find the split that minimizes total processing time.

“Took me a few minutes to even figure out what state to track.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Amazon SWE behavioral round, one meaty question about tackling something way outside your comfort zone. Pretty standard loop format but this question had some real teeth to it.
  • Tell me about a time you had to work on a problem that was well outside your expertise or unusually complex. Walk through how you got up to speed, broke it down, figured out what you didn't know, decided what to learn yourself versus what to hand off, and how you got it across the finish line. Focus on the judgment calls you made with incomplete information and what the actual impact was.

“This one took me a second to land on the right story.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026
Amazon SWE loop, behavioral round with a GenAI twist. The dive deep questions were sharper than I expected and the whole thing leaned pretty technical for what was supposed to be a leadership principles session.
  • Tell me about a time you dove deep into a complex technical problem related to generative AI.

“This was the core of the whole interview.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Amazon SWE interview with a mix of classic hard leetcode problems and a practical system design question about their locker product. Nothing too surprising but the locker design was a nice change of pace from pure algo grind.
  • Given an array of integers, for each element count how many numbers to its right are smaller than it. Return the result as an array.
  • Merge k sorted linked lists into a single sorted linked list.
  • Design the getPackage operation for Amazon's locker system, where a customer retrieves their package from a locker.

“This is a brutal one if you haven't seen it before.”

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Amazon·Product Manager·Onsite - Product Sense / Strategy

Jun 2026
Amazon PM interview with a single product design question about building a credit card feature for kids. Pretty open-ended, which sounds fun until you're actually sitting there trying to figure out where to start.
  • How would you design a credit card product specifically for kids?

“I jumped straight into features and had to backtrack pretty quickly once I realized I hadn't thought about who exactly 'kids' meant here.”

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Amazon·Software Engineer·Online Assessment (OA)

Jun 2026
Amazon OA for a SWE role, one algorithmic problem about reordering an array to minimize cumulative variation. Pretty clean problem once you see the pattern, but I definitely stared at it longer than I should have.
  • Given an array of product sizes, reorder the array to minimize the total sum of variation values, where variation at each index is the difference between the max and min of all elements seen so far. Return the minimum possible sum.

“Took me a while to realize that sorting is the key.”

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