Amazon SDE Interview Questions (2026): Process, Questions and Prep

The process below comes from Amazon’s own interviewing page, checked in October 2026. Amazon says the process differs from role to role, so your recruiter’s instructions come first. The questions are practice material covering common patterns, not a leaked list.

How the process works

Amazon lists four stages:

1. Online application.
2. Assessments. For engineering roles this usually includes an online coding test.
3. Phone screening.
4. Interview loop. Several interviews, usually back to back, often including a Bar Raiser from outside the hiring team.

Amazon’s Leadership Principles run through the whole process, technical rounds included. Candidates commonly report at least one behavioral question in most interviews of the loop.

Coding questions to practise

The coding rounds test whether you can turn a vague problem into working code while explaining your thinking. These patterns come up again and again:

• Arrays and hashing
• Two pointers and sliding window
• Trees and graphs (BFS and DFS)
• Heaps and “top K” problems
• Intervals
• Dynamic programming basics

Classic problems that cover those patterns:

• Two Sum
• Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters
• Merge Intervals
• Top K Frequent Elements
• Number of Islands
• Rotting Oranges
• Course Schedule
• Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree
• Merge k Sorted Lists
• LRU Cache
• Word Ladder

In every coding round, interviewers look for the same habits: ask about input size and edge cases before you code, explain a simple approach first, state the time and space complexity, then test your code with an example, including an edge case.

System design questions (SDE II and above)

Practice prompts:

• Design a URL shortener.
• Design a notification service that sends email, SMS and push messages.
• Design order tracking for an e-commerce site.
• Design a rate limiter.
• Design product search with autocomplete.

A structure that works for almost any prompt:

1. Requirements: what’s in scope and what isn’t
2. Rough scale: users, requests per second, data size
3. API: the handful of calls the system has to support
4. Data model
5. High-level design
6. Bottlenecks and trade-offs

Spend the first five minutes on steps 1 and 2. Most candidates jump straight to drawing boxes and end up defending a design for requirements nobody agreed on.

Leadership Principle questions

Leadership Principle	Practice question
Customer Obsession	Tell me about a time you went beyond what a customer asked for.
Ownership	Tell me about a time you took on something outside your responsibilities.
Dive Deep	Tell me about a time you found the root cause of a hard problem.
Bias for Action	Tell me about a decision you made without all the information you wanted.
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit	Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager or team.
Deliver Results	Tell me about a time you missed a deadline. What happened next?
Invent and Simplify	Tell me about a time you made a process simpler.
Learn and Be Curious	Tell me about something you had to learn quickly to solve a problem.
Earn Trust	Tell me about a time you received critical feedback.

Answer each one with a real story in the STAR format: the situation in two sentences, the task, what you did (not the team), and the result, with a number if you have one.

A four-week prep plan

• Week 1: Work through the patterns above, two or three problems a day.
• Week 2: Solve timed problems out loud, as if an interviewer were listening. Record yourself once and listen back.
• Week 3: Write eight to ten STAR stories and map each to one or two Leadership Principles. Practise saying them in under two minutes.
• Week 4: Do mock interviews with a friend or a peer, including at least one full system design round if you’re interviewing for SDE II or above.