Amazon software engineering interview questions

The Process

Five stages, and two of them are not interviews

01

30 to 45 minPhone call

Recruiter screen

Not scored like a real round, but the level written down on this call shapes every interview after it. An SDE III loop is a different day from an SDE II loop.

Settle your level on this call, not later.
Changing it after the loop means redoing rounds or taking a down level offer. Both cost weeks you will not get back.
Ask which org the team sits in.
AWS, Ads, Retail and Devices run the same official loop but weight distributed systems and operational depth very differently.
Give a range with a reason attached.
Amazon works from bands with a level specific base cap, so a single number this early quietly becomes your ceiling.

02

2 to 3 hoursHackerRank

Online assessment

Two coding problems in 70 to 90 minutes, then a work simulation and a short work style survey. It filters you out before a human reads your CV.

Hidden test cases decide your score.
Empty input, a single element, integer overflow. Spend the last five minutes walking the awkward inputs by hand.
The work simulation is a fake inbox.
Emails from a manager and two teammates, a log dump to read, a ticket to prioritise. All of it scored against the Leadership Principles.
Answer the work style survey consistently.
It repeats the same question in different wording, specifically to catch people guessing at the answer they think Amazon wants.

03

45 to 60 minShared editorNo AI tools

Technical phone screen

One medium problem, sometimes two shorter ones, plus at least one Leadership Principles question in the same hour. Most failures here are communication, not difficulty.

Ask about the input before you write code.
Size, ranges, duplicates, whether it fits in memory. The interviewer is scoring whether you asked at all.
Say the complexity out loud before you code.
Explaining only once the code is on screen is the most common way a solid candidate gets written up as unclear.
Leave ten minutes for the behavioural.
The interviewer has to fill in a Leadership Principles section either way, and a rushed story gets recorded as thin.

04

4 to 6 roundsOne dayVirtual

The onsite loop

For SDE II that is two coding rounds, a system design round and either a low level design or a third coding round, four to six sessions in a single day. One interviewer is the Bar Raiser and you are not told which.

One of them is the Bar Raiser.
You are not told which. Assume every round is scoring Leadership Principles alongside the technical work, because it is.
Do the capacity arithmetic out loud.
Being asked for a number and shrugging is the most common way the design round goes badly. Estimate, then sanity check it.
Bring your own actions and your own numbers.
Behavioural follow ups go three or four levels deep. They keep asking what you did next and who disagreed with you.

05

1 to 3 weeksNo candidate input

Debrief and offer

Every interviewer files written feedback before seeing anyone else's. The Bar Raiser sits outside the hiring team and can veto a hire the team wants.

An even loop clears the bar, a spiky one stalls.
One standout round next to one thin one usually stalls here, because the decision is argued from written evidence.
Down level is more common than rejection.
If they think you are strong but not at the level you interviewed for, that is the usual outcome rather than a no.
Ask your recruiter for a date, not a guess.
Debrief within about a week, decision a few days later, then approval and negotiation add more on top of that.

Levels and Pay

The headline number assumes a flat vest. It is not flat

Pick a level to see how the package splits, what changes by city, and what the loop actually asks of you at that band.

Seattle

Bay Area

New York

Austin

Level	Experience	Total comp
Software Engineer IL4Entry	0 to 2 yrs	~$196K
Software Engineer IIL5Mid	2 to 5 yrs	~$268K
Senior EngineerL6Senior	5 to 10 yrs	~$390K
Principal EngineerL7Principal	10 to 15 yrs	~$660K
Senior PrincipalL8Sr Prin	15+ yrs	~$1.05M

Live Question Feed

What Amazon is asking right now

87 questions · new ones added every 7 days

87 Verified

CODING

Count distinct islands in a grid of 1s and 0s, then extend it to handle streaming updates where cells flip state.

Online assessment

70 to 90 min

HackerRank

Reported 6 times

Open

SYSTEM DESIGN

Design a distributed rate limiter that holds up across regions and degrades gracefully under burst traffic.

Locked

BAR RAISER

Tell me about a time you disagreed with a decision your team had already committed to.

Locked

CODING

Implement an LRU cache with O(1) get and put, then extend it to support TTL expiry and concurrency.

Locked

SYSTEM DESIGN

Design the order fulfilment pipeline for same day delivery across regional warehouses.

Locked

OBJECT DESIGN

Model a parking garage with pricing tiers and concurrent entry and exit, then walk the class diagram.

Locked

BEHAVIORAL

Describe something you owned end to end where the outcome was worse than you expected.

Locked

CODING

Return the top k product suggestions for each prefix a customer types, then bound the memory it uses.

Locked

BAR RAISER

Give me an example of a decision you made with about half the data you wanted.

Locked

86 more questions available

The exact questions Amazon is asking this week, tagged by round and difficulty.

Unlock All 87 Questions

Each question stays in the bank for 14 days, so everything here was asked in the last 14 days. Candidates who see them first pass at 3.2 times the normal rate.

Get Full Access

The Unfair Advantage

Why this actually works

01

Real questions, not guesses

Collected from engineers who sat the loop, then cross validated against other intel sources.

02

Fresh every week

We add new questions every 7 days and retire each one after 14 days, so the bank turns over twice in the window it covers.

03

Covers every round

Coding, system design, low level design, the Bar Raiser behavioural round and the online assessment.

04

120+ companies tracked

Also interviewing at Google, Meta or Microsoft? We have their questions too.

05

Difficulty and pattern data

Tagged by difficulty, round and category, so you know where prep time goes.

06

Candidate verified only

Reported by a candidate, then cross verified against multiple data points.

3.2×

Higher pass rate

120+

Companies tracked

3.2K+

Engineers using this

FAQ

Common questions

How are the questions sourced?

Directly from engineers who interviewed at Amazon, then cross validated against other intel sources into a stack ranked list.

How often are questions updated?

We add new questions every 7 days and retire each one after 14 days, so the bank turns over twice in the window it covers.

Does Amazon ask LeetCode questions?

Yes, and the bar sits at medium rather than punishing. Hash maps, trees, graphs with BFS and DFS, sliding window, heaps and intervals. Dynamic programming shows up more at senior levels.

Can I use AI tools in the interview?

No, and that includes the HackerRank online assessment. Amazon states it in the candidate instructions and has removed people from processes for ignoring it.

What is the Amazon Bar Raiser?

A trained interviewer from outside the hiring team who protects the long term bar rather than filling the role. They lead the debrief and hold an effective veto.

What does Amazon pay an SDE II?

Around $268K in Seattle, about $308K in the Bay Area. Roughly 24 percent of that is RSUs vesting 5, 15, 40 then 40 percent, so year one lands well below the headline.

How long does the process take?

Four to eight weeks. The online assessment turns around in days, but the debrief and offer approval add one to three weeks after the loop.

Is this just for Amazon?

No. GothamLoop covers 120+ companies including Google, Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and Apple.

The Amazon interview cheat code nobody talks about

Five stages, and two of them are not interviews

Recruiter screen

Online assessment

Technical phone screen

The onsite loop

Debrief and offer

The headline number assumes a flat vest. It is not flat

What Amazon is asking right now

Why this actually works

Real questions, not guesses

Fresh every week

Covers every round

120+ companies tracked

Difficulty and pattern data

Candidate verified only

Common questions

Pricing plan

Company Interview Guides