Amazon interview process (2026)
Round-by-round breakdown of the Amazon software engineering interview across 4 levels and 24 rounds: interview mode, sample questions, and worked solutions.
SDE Intern (6-Month) / Summer SDE Intern
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 4-9 weeks · Recommended prep: 6-10 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-month
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Round 0: Online Assessment 1 - Coding + CS Fundamentals MCQs (Mettl)
Assessment · ~90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Number of Islands — Given an m x n 2D grid of '1' (land) and '0' (water), count the number of islands. An island is a group of '1's connected horizontally or vertically (not diagonally); assume the grid is surrounded by water.
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Round 1: Online Assessment 2 - 2 Coding Problems + Leadership Principles behavioral (HackerRank)
Assessment · ~90 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
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Round 2: Technical Interview (virtual, Amazon Chime) - DSA + Leadership Principles
Onsite · ~60-70 min · difficulty 2/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Product of Array Except Self — Given an integer array nums, return an array answer such that answer[i] equals the product of all elements of nums except nums[i]. Solve in O(n) time without using the division operation.
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Round 3: Offer / Waitlist
Offer · ~1 week
Mode of interview: Offer discussion
SDE I (New Grad / Entry Level, ~L4)
Difficulty: Medium · Timeline: 4-8 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: ~6-month
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Round 0: Application & Resume Screen
Other · N/A (async review) · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Interview format varies by team
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Round 1: Online Assessment (OA)
Assessment · ~70-105 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Number of Islands — Given an m x n binary grid of '1' (land) and '0' (water), count the number of islands. An island is formed by connecting adjacent lands horizontally or vertically.
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Round 2: Technical Phone Screen
Phone · 45-60 minutes · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
Sample question: Merge Intervals — Given an array of intervals [start, end], merge all overlapping intervals and return the non-overlapping intervals that cover all the input intervals.
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Round 3: Onsite Loop - Coding (2 rounds)
Onsite · ~55 minutes · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Course Schedule — There are numCourses courses labeled 0..numCourses-1 with prerequisite pairs [a, b] meaning you must take b before a. Return whether it is possible to finish all courses (i.e., the prerequisite graph is acyclic).
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Round 4: Onsite Loop - Low-Level / Object-Oriented Design
System_design · ~55 minutes · difficulty 2/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design a Parking Lot System (LLD / OOD) — Design the classes for a multi-floor parking lot: support multiple vehicle types (motorcycle/car/bus) and matching spot sizes, park/unpark, find available spot, and a simple ticket/payment model. Discuss class hierarchy, allocation strategy, and concurrency of spot assignment.
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Round 5: Onsite Loop - Behavioral / Leadership Principles (includes Bar Raiser)
Behavioral · ~55 minutes · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
Sample question: Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate - how did you handle it?
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Round 6: Debrief / Hiring Decision & Offer
Offer · Outcome typically within ~5 business days of the loop · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Offer discussion
SDE II (Mid-level, L5)
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: 4-8 weeks · Recommended prep: 8-12 weeks · Cooldown: 6-month
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Round 0: Resume / Recruiter Screen
Other · 15-30 min · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Interview format varies by team
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Round 1: Online Assessment (OA)
Assessment · 90 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Online assessment
Sample question: Minimum Window Substring — Given strings s and t, return the minimum-length substring of s that contains every character of t (including duplicates). Return "" if no such window exists.
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Round 2: Technical Phone Screen
Phone · 45-60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
Sample question: Word Ladder — Given beginWord, endWord, and a wordList, return the number of words in the shortest transformation sequence from beginWord to endWord where each step changes exactly one letter and every intermediate word is in wordList. Return 0 if no sequence exists.
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Round 3: Onsite Loop - Coding (2 rounds)
Onsite · 55 minutes · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Trapping Rain Water — Given n non-negative integers representing an elevation map where the width of each bar is 1, compute how much water it can trap after raining.
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Round 4: Onsite Loop - System Design
System_design · ~55 minutes · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design an API Rate Limiter — Design a rate limiter for an API gateway (e.g., 100 requests/min/user). Discuss algorithm choice (token bucket vs sliding window), where it runs (gateway vs sidecar), distributed counter storage (Redis) with atomicity, handling clock skew and bursts, and behavior under a cache/store outage.
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Round 5: Onsite Loop - Behavioral / Leadership Principles (includes Bar Raiser)
Behavioral · ~55 minutes · difficulty 3/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
Sample question: Tell me about a time you made a decision with incomplete information.
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Round 6: Debrief / Hiring Decision & Offer
Offer · Outcome typically within ~5 business days · difficulty 1/5
Mode of interview: Offer discussion
SDE III (Senior, L6)
Difficulty: Hard · Timeline: 4-8 weeks · Recommended prep: Senior candidates typically prep 8-12+ w · Cooldown: 6-month
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Round 0: Resume / Recruiter Screen
Other · Async resume review + recruiter call · difficulty 2/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Interview format varies by team
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Round 1: Technical Phone Screen (with a senior leader)
Phone · 60 minutes · difficulty 3/5 · elimination round
Mode of interview: Remote phone or video interview
Sample question: Merge K Sorted Lists — You are given k sorted linked lists. Merge them into one sorted list and return it.
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Round 2: Onsite Loop - Coding (1-2 rounds, LeetCode-hard)
Onsite · 55 minutes · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Onsite or virtual onsite interview
Sample question: Find Median from Data Stream — Design a data structure that supports adding integers from a stream and, after each insertion, returns the median of all elements seen so far. Reading n then n integers, print the running median after each addNum.
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Round 3: Onsite Loop - System Design (1-2 rounds, distributed)
System_design · 55 minutes · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Live system design interview
Sample question: Design Amazon's Product Recommendation Engine — Design a recommendation system serving ~100M users. Cover candidate generation vs ranking, offline (batch feature/model pipelines) vs online (low-latency inference) paths, feature/embedding stores, caching of read-heavy recommendation surfaces, cold-start, and A/B evaluation. Emphasize service decomposition and eventual consistency.
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Round 4: Onsite Loop - Behavioral / Leadership Principles (includes Bar Raiser)
Behavioral · ~55 minutes · difficulty 4/5
Mode of interview: Live behavioral interview
Sample question: Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager (or leadership) - how did you handle it?
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Round 5: Debrief / Hiring Decision & Offer
Offer · Outcome typically within ~5 business days · difficulty 2/5
Mode of interview: Offer discussion
Other companies' interview processes
Worked sample solutions (code, design diagrams, and STAR answers) for every round are available in the FAANGPlus app: open interview processes.