Amazon·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture
Jun 2026
Amazon system design round for a senior engineering role, basically one big question about building a music streaming platform from scratch. They wanted the whole thing: storage, CDN, search, playlists, DRM, social, analytics. A lot of ground to cover in one session.
- Design a mobile music streaming app (think Spotify or QQ Music). Walk through how you'd handle catalog storage, audio streaming with adaptive bitrate, search, user playlists, recommendations, offline downloads with DRM, social features, and analytics.
- How would you model the data for a user's library, playlists, and the music catalog itself? Walk through your schema choices.
- What are the key non-functional requirements you'd prioritize for a music streaming service, and how do you address latency, availability, and copyright compliance at scale?
- How would you design the API layer for this platform? What endpoints matter most and how do you think about versioning and client compatibility for mobile?
- How would you approach search for a music catalog? What does the indexing strategy look like and how do you handle fuzzy matching for song titles and artist names?
- How would you build the recommendations system? What signals would you use and how does it connect to the rest of the platform architecture?
“This is basically a 'design everything' question disguised as one prompt.” The rest of the author's notes on Software Engineer interview at Amazon, Onsite - System Design / Architecture round, covers how they worked through the question, what the panel pushed back on, and what they would do differently.
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