Amazon SDE interview questions by stage: the coding, design and Leadership Principle questions SDE I and SDE II candidates face, plus a 3-week plan.
Amazon SDE interview questions fall into three kinds, and every stage mixes them: coding problems where you must write runnable code, a design question (object-oriented design for most new grads, system design for SDE II and above), and behavioral questions scored against Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles. This page walks through the stages in the order you meet them, gives 12 representative questions with what the interviewer is checking and a short approach for each, and ends with a three-week plan.
If you are interviewing for a non-engineering role, or want the full behavioral bank with a prompt for every principle, start with our Amazon interview question bank instead. This page stays with software engineers, from new graduates to SDE II.
How Amazon describes the SDE process
Amazon lists four hiring stages on its How We Hire page: the online application, assessments, phone screening and the interview loop. The process differs by role, and Amazon publishes separate prep pages for SDE II and SDE III, so read the one for your level first.
For full-time university SDE roles, Amazon's online assessment page lists a coding assessment averaging 70 minutes, a work styles assessment averaging 15 minutes, a work simulation averaging 60 minutes and a short feedback survey, and it tells candidates to set aside up to two hours. The internship version has no work simulation. For SDE II, the assessment comes before the loop: two coding questions in 90 minutes, then short system design and work styles sections. Our Amazon online assessment guide covers each section and its rules.
After the assessment, the SDE II page describes a loop of four 55-minute interviews, while the SDE III page describes five 55-minute interviews preceded by a 60-minute phone screen with a senior leader. Amazon says interviewers are assigned different competencies tied to the Leadership Principles, and both pages say each one typically asks two or three behavioral questions, so they appear in technical rounds too. Amazon also says it will not ask brain teasers. If your process includes a phone screen, our Amazon phone interview guide covers that call.
Your loop may include a Bar Raiser. Amazon describes Bar Raisers as trained interviewers from outside the hiring team who facilitate the debrief and make the final hiring decision together with the hiring manager, so one strong round cannot carry the loop.
What changes between SDE I and SDE II
Amazon publishes prep pages for SDE II and SDE III but, as far as we could find, no page that states the size or make-up of a new-grad SDE loop. Third-party guides fill the gap: Hello Interview's L4 guide describes two coding rounds, one object-oriented design round and one round run by a Bar Raiser, and lists object-oriented design prompts such as a parking lot. Treat that as a report rather than an official rule, and ask your recruiter which subjects your interviews will cover, as Amazon's own recruiters advise.
At SDE II the official wording is firmer: "Expect at least one question on software systems design." The SDE II page describes work that spans a feature's life cycle and trade-offs between feature and operational work, so in our reading the same principles are judged against a wider scope. Our guide to SDE II behavioral interview mistakes shows one story told at both levels.
Hello Interview also reports that Amazon is rolling out an AI-assisted coding round, where you work with an AI assistant, into the SDE I assessment, and that the rollout is uneven. At least one candidate report from July 2026 describes a first round with a standard algorithm question plus an AI-assisted, repository-based task. Neither is an Amazon announcement, so confirm the format with your recruiter.
Amazon SDE coding interview questions
Amazon's prep pages describe what coding interviewers look for in one sentence: "The most important thing a SDE does at Amazon is write scalable, robust, and well-tested code." They add that the code must be syntactically correct rather than pseudocode, that you should check edge cases, and that bad input should not get through. The four problems below are classic examples of common problem types, not questions Amazon is known to ask; for a topic-by-topic practice list built from the areas Amazon names, see our page on Amazon LeetCode interview questions.
1. Count the islands in a grid of land and water
The interviewer is testing whether you can model a grid as a graph and traverse it without double-counting. Scan every cell, and each time you reach unvisited land, increase the count and run a breadth-first or depth-first search that marks the whole island as visited. Say the cost out loud, which is linear in the number of cells, and mention that an iterative search avoids recursion limits on very large grids.
2. Merge overlapping intervals, then find how many meeting rooms are needed
This pair tests sorting and your data-structure choice for the follow-up. Sort the intervals by start time and merge each one into the previous interval whenever it starts before that interval ends. For meeting rooms, keep a min-heap of end times, free a room whenever the earliest meeting has ended, and report the largest size the heap ever reached.
3. Design a least-recently-used cache
Here the interviewer wants to see two data structures combined to meet a stated cost, usually constant-time reads and writes. Pair a hash map from key to node with a doubly linked list ordered by recent use, move a node to the front on every read or write, and evict from the back when the cache is over capacity. Test the capacity-one case and an update to an existing key.
4. Return the k most active users from a server log (illustrative)
This illustrative variant exercises Amazon's "bad input" point. Ask what a malformed line looks like and what should happen to it, count valid entries in a hash map, and keep a min-heap of size k, which costs roughly n log k. Before you finish, state how you break ties and what happens when k is larger than the number of users.
Design questions
5. SDE I: design a parking lot
Hello Interview lists a parking lot among its example L4 prompts. The interviewer is checking whether you can turn a vague description into classes with clear responsibilities, such as a lot, levels, spots of different sizes, vehicles and tickets. Clarify the rules first, then show how your design absorbs a new requirement, such as electric charging spots, without rewriting existing classes.
6. SDE II: design a service that tells customers when an order's delivery status changes (illustrative)
Amazon's SDE II page says interviewers will probe your design and that you should ask questions to complete and validate it, and it lists practicality, reliability and scalability among the objectives. Start with requirements: which status changes matter, which channels, how quickly a message must arrive and roughly how many orders change state per second. A reasonable shape publishes status-change events to a queue, has workers look up each customer's notification preferences and send messages, and stores an idempotency key so that retries do not send duplicates. The trade-off worth naming is that at-least-once delivery is simpler to build reliably, so you must design for duplicates rather than assume they never happen.
7. SDE II: walk me through a system you built
This tests whether you made the decisions your résumé lists. Pick a system you know deeply, draw its main components, and explain one choice you would make differently now and why.
Behavioral questions by principle
Prepare one story per principle and expect two or three per round. Amazon recommends the STAR method and asks for metrics or data where they apply. The principle names below are Amazon's; the pairing of each question with a principle is our reading.
8. Customer Obsession: tell me about a time you changed a technical plan because of what a customer needed
The interviewer wants evidence that you start from the user rather than the code. A strong answer names the customer, the signal that changed your mind and what the change cost the team.
9. Ownership: tell me about a problem you fixed that was not strictly yours
Amazon wants to hear that you act like an owner beyond your ticket. Describe how you noticed the problem, why you did not leave it for someone else, and how you made sure it stayed fixed.
10. Dive Deep: tell me about the hardest bug you have tracked down
Interviewers are checking whether you follow evidence or guess. Here is an illustrative shape for a strong answer: a nightly job began failing about once a week; you collected the failing runs, noticed they all overlapped with a backup window, reproduced the lock contention, moved the schedule and added an alert, and the failures stopped. It works because every step is something you did and each step is driven by data.
11. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision
The interviewer wants respectful challenge followed by real commitment. Explain the data you brought, how the decision was made, and what you did once it went against you, because the last part is where most answers stop too early.
12. Deliver Results: tell me about a time you shipped under a deadline with incomplete information
Judgment under pressure is the point of this one. Name what you cut or deferred, why that was the right trade-off and what the measurable outcome was. Amazon's recruiters also advise preparing a clear "Why Amazon?" answer.
A three-week preparation plan
In week one, read the prep page for your level and Amazon's software development topics page, and ask your recruiter what your interviews will cover. Spend most of the week on one or two problems a day from the common types above, written in a plain editor rather than an IDE, as Amazon recommends, and say the complexity out loud each time.
In week two, keep solving problems, but add your design round: object-oriented design prompts for SDE I, or two or three system design prompts for SDE II, each talked through from requirements to trade-offs in about 40 minutes. Also write a STAR story for each principle above, plus a failure story, each with a number and your own role made clear.
In week three, rehearse under loop conditions. Run at least two back-to-back sessions that mix a coding problem with two behavioral questions, because that mix is what Amazon's own description of the loop implies.
Practise the loop out loud
Code is easy to rehearse on your own, but your stories only improve once you say them aloud, and every interviewer asks for them. Verve AI's AI Mock Interview lets you choose a question bank for the role, answer an AI recruiter one question at a time, and receive a detailed performance report with personalized feedback and scoring based on your responses, so week three can include stories you have actually said aloud.
FAQ
How many interviews are in the Amazon SDE loop?
Amazon's SDE II prep page describes four 55-minute interviews, and its SDE III page describes five. Amazon does not publish a loop size for new-grad SDE roles that we could find. Third-party guides describe four rounds for L4, but trust your recruiter's invitation.
Do SDE I candidates get system design questions?
Amazon says most technical interviews include coding and system design whiteboarding. Hello Interview describes the L4 design round as object-oriented design, with prompts such as a parking lot. Prepare object-oriented design first, then learn enough system design vocabulary to discuss trade-offs if asked.
Are behavioral questions only in one round?
Behavioral questions are not confined to one round. Amazon's SDE II and SDE III pages say each interviewer typically asks two or three behavioral questions tied to the Leadership Principles. Expect them in coding and design rounds too.
Sources
- Amazon's four hiring stages and list of role prep pages: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire
- SDE II loop (four 55-minute interviews), coding expectations, "at least one question on software systems design", two or three behavioral questions per interviewer, STAR, metrics, no brain teasers: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/sde-ii-interview-prep
- SDE II online assessment (two coding questions in 90 minutes, system design and work styles sections): https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/sde-ii-oa-prep
- SDE III loop (five 55-minute interviews, 60-minute phone screen with a senior leader): https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/sde-iii-interview-prep
- University SDE online assessment sections and average durations, up to two hours: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/university/sde-oa
- Software development topics, coding and system design whiteboarding, practise outside an IDE: https://amazon.jobs/software-development-topics
- Interview loop: individual interviews, each assessing different aspects: https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/interview-loop
- The 16 Leadership Principles and their names: https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles
- Recruiter tips (ask your recruiter about topics, "Why Amazon?", bad input, edge cases), April 18, 2024: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-job-interview-software-development-engineer-recruiter-tips
- Bar Raisers come from outside the team, facilitate debriefs, decide with the hiring manager: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-bar-raiser
- Third-party L4 guide (two coding rounds, OOD round, round run by a Bar Raiser; parking lot example; uneven rollout of an AI-assisted coding round into the SDE I assessment): https://www.hellointerview.com/guides/amazon/l4
- Candidate report, July 2026 (first round with a DSA question and an AI-assisted, repo-based task): https://prachub.com/interview-experiences/amazon-software-engineer-interview-dsa-edge-cases-and-an-ai-assisted-repository-task-9329a70a4c
- Verve AI Mock Interview (question bank, AI recruiter, performance report with personalized feedback and scoring): https://docs.vervecopilot.com/features/mock-interview
Ryan
CEO of Verve AI
