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Amplitude

Mid-sized

Screna has 12 Amplitude interview write-ups. The most reported round is the technical phone screen (7).

12 interview notes · updated Jul 2026

Amplitude·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026
System design round at Amplitude for a software engineering role. The prompt was a shared to-do list app, which sounds straightforward until you actually have to spec out the API and schema from scratch under time pressure.
  • Design an online application for sharing to-do lists with others. List the API endpoints and define a database schema that supports real-time updates.

“I spent too long on the data model and barely had time to talk through the real-time piece, which was clearly the part they cared about.”

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Amplitude·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Got a coding question from Amplitude for a software engineer role, dictionary encoding compression. Pretty self-contained problem but there are a few edge cases that'll trip you up if you're not careful.
  • Implement an encode function and a decode function for dictionary encoding compression. The encoder takes a comma-separated string of words and outputs a compressed string where unique words form a dictionary and each original word is replaced by its index. The decoder reconstructs the original string from that compressed format alone, with no extra data passed along.

“The problem looks clean on the surface until you realize the decoder has to figure out where the dictionary ends and the index list begins just from the compressed string.”

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Amplitude·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Amplitude SWE interview with a compression-focused coding problem. The question had more design surface area than I expected for what seemed like a straightforward implementation task.
  • Implement a dictionary encoding compression scheme with two methods: one that encodes a list of strings into a compact format (dict part plus index sequence), and one that decodes it back to the original list. You also need to justify your delimiter choices and explain how you'd handle edge cases where words contain those delimiters.

“I jumped straight into coding and picked comma and colon as delimiters without thinking it through.”

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Amplitude·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Did a technical phone screen for a software engineer role at Amplitude. One linked list problem, but the edge cases made it way less straightforward than I expected going in.
  • Given the head of a singly linked list and an integer K, swap the K-th node from the end with the head node in-place (O(1) extra memory) and return the new head.

“The base case tripped me up more than the main logic.”

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Amplitude·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jun 2026
Amplitude software engineering interview with two coding problems back to back. The employee validation one had a sneaky follow-up that I wasn't fully ready for, and the snake game was more involved than it sounds.
  • Implement a function that validates a collection of employees against a set of business rules, where employees can have direct reports and validation must recurse through all descendants.
  • Implement a simplified Snake game on a 2D grid with directional keyboard input, wall collision detection, and apple consumption that grows the snake's length.

“The recursive part wasn't too bad once I mapped out the tree structure in my head.”

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Amplitude·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

May 2026
System design round at Amplitude for a software engineer role. The prompt was building a collaborative todo list app, which sounds simple but they pushed into real-time sync territory pretty fast and that's where things got interesting.
  • What are the core product requirements and user flows for a collaborative todo list sharing application?
  • Design the backend APIs for creating todo lists, sharing them with other users, and managing individual todo items.
  • Design a database schema to store users, todo lists, permissions, and individual items.
  • How would you support real-time updates so all collaborators see changes to a shared list immediately?

“Started here and it felt like a warmup but I almost rushed through it.”

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Amplitude·Software Engineer·Hiring Manager Screen

May 2026
Behavioral round with the hiring manager at Amplitude for a software engineer role. Pretty standard stuff, nothing that should trip you up if you've done this kind of interview before.
  • Walk me through a past project you're proud of.
  • How would you describe your working style?
  • Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a teammate and how you handled it.
  • What drew you to this role specifically?
  • How do you see yourself contributing to the team?

“I went with a recent one but probably should've picked something with more visible impact.”

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Amplitude·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amplitude SWE interview with a tree validation problem that sounds straightforward but has enough moving parts to trip you up if you're not careful about how you structure your solution.
  • Given a forest of employee objects where each node can have sub-employees (direct reports), write a function that validates every employee in the hierarchy against a configurable set of rules. An employee is only considered valid if it passes all rules AND every one of its transitive reports does too. Discuss your data structure choices, how you'd organize the rule set, whether to short-circuit on first failure or collect all violations, and the time complexity.

“I went straight for a recursive DFS and that part was fine.”

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Amplitude·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

May 2026
Amplitude SWE interview with a linked list pointer manipulation problem. Nothing too wild but the O(1) memory constraint plus the no-value-swapping rule made it trickier than it looked on the surface.
  • Given a singly linked list and an integer k, swap the k-th node from the end with the head node by changing pointers only, using O(1) extra memory. Return the new head.

“My first instinct was to just swap the values and call it done, but they explicitly said no value swapping, pointer changes only.”

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Amplitude·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Apr 2026
Amplitude SWE interview that focused on extending a recursive employee validator with cycle detection. The problem sounds straightforward until you're actually in it trying to juggle DFS state and API contract decisions at the same time.
  • You have a recursive employee validator that traverses a hierarchy of employee objects. Malformed input can contain cycles (e.g. A reports to B, B reports to C, C reports to A). Add cycle detection to the existing validate() function using DFS coloring or an ancestor-tracking set, in O(N) time and space.
  • When cycle detection fires, what should the validator do: return false or mark the offending nodes as invalid, versus raising or reporting a structured error with the cycle's node IDs? Walk through the trade-offs and defend a choice.

“I went with the ancestor-set approach because it felt more readable than juggling three color states mid-interview.”

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