Amazon software engineer interview questions
Use representative practice prompts for the coding, system design, and Leadership Principles areas Amazon describes for software engineering interviews.
Practice guide: Interview content varies by role, level, team, and location. These representative prompts are based on public company guidance and general interview patterns; Amazon does not endorse this guide.
11 questions, one at a time
Coding questions
Each problem has a full statement, examples, constraints, and a tested solution in Python, Java and C++.
Two Sum
Return the indices of the two numbers that add up to a target.
Valid Parentheses
Check whether a string of brackets opens and closes correctly.
Merge Intervals
Merge every group of overlapping intervals.
LRU Cache
Build a fixed-size cache that evicts the least recently used key in O(1).
Number of Islands
Count the groups of connected land cells in a grid.
System design questions
Turn requirements into APIs, data models, architecture choices, bottlenecks, and explicit trade-offs.
Behavioral questions
Prepare truthful evidence of decisions, ownership, collaboration, learning, and measurable results.
Tell me about a time you failed.
Ownership, honest reflection, and whether you changed the system—not just apologized.
Tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager.
Whether you can challenge a decision with evidence, listen, and commit after the decision is made.
Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a customer.
How you uncover the real customer need and balance it with durable business judgment.
Tell me about a decision you made with incomplete information.
Speed, risk judgment, and your ability to distinguish reversible from irreversible decisions.
Tell me about a process you improved.
Whether you find root causes, simplify work, and prove that the improvement lasts.
How the Amazon interview is structured
Amazon says software-development interviews assess coding, programming languages, data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, databases, distributed computing, operating systems, and internet topics. Behavioral answers are evaluated through its Leadership Principles.
That shapes how you should prepare. The rounds in this guide break down as 5 coding, 1 system design, 5 behavioral, and they are not interchangeable — a coding round rewards a working solution reasoned aloud, a system design round rewards explicit trade-offs, and a behavioral round rewards a specific story with a measurable result. The fastest way to lose a round you could have passed is to prepare for all three the same way.
What the coding round checks
Each problem has a full statement, examples, constraints, and a tested solution in Python, Java and C++.
- Hash-map selection, correctness, handling duplicates, and the ability to improve a brute-force solution.
- Stack reasoning, invariant clarity, and careful handling of malformed input.
- Sorting, boundary reasoning, clean iteration, and explicit decisions about touching intervals.
- Combining data structures to meet a strict complexity target and maintaining invariants correctly.
What the system design round checks
Turn requirements into APIs, data models, architecture choices, bottlenecks, and explicit trade-offs.
- Requirement clarification, scalable data modeling, API design, reliability, and trade-off communication.
What the behavioral round checks
Prepare truthful evidence of decisions, ownership, collaboration, learning, and measurable results.
- Ownership, honest reflection, and whether you changed the system—not just apologized.
- Whether you can challenge a decision with evidence, listen, and commit after the decision is made.
- How you uncover the real customer need and balance it with durable business judgment.
- Speed, risk judgment, and your ability to distinguish reversible from irreversible decisions.
Follow-up questions to be ready for
Most candidates prepare a first answer and stop. The round is usually decided by what comes after it — these are the follow-ups the questions in this guide lead to:
- What if the input is sorted?
- What if you need every valid pair?
- Can you solve it without extra space?
- Can you report the first invalid position?
- How would streaming input change the solution?
- What if other characters are allowed?
- Can you avoid mutating the input?
- What changes if intervals arrive as a stream?
Mistakes that cost people the Amazon round
Collected from the questions in this guide. None of them is about knowing less — they are all about how an answer is delivered under time pressure:
- Checking the current value after inserting it
- Returning values instead of indices without clarifying
- Claiming constant space for the hash map
- Popping an empty stack
- Checking only counts instead of order
- Forgetting leftover opening brackets
- Skipping the touching-boundary rule
- Appending before the current interval is complete
Common questions
What does Amazon test in a software engineer interview?
Amazon says software-development interviews assess coding, programming languages, data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, databases, distributed computing, operating systems, and internet topics. Behavioral answers are evaluated through its Leadership Principles.
What is in this Amazon question list?
11 representative practice questions — 5 coding, 1 system design, 5 behavioral. Each one comes with what the interviewer is checking, a three-step plan for the answer, the follow-ups that usually come next, and the mistakes that cost people the round. Coding questions also carry a full problem statement, examples, constraints and tested solutions in Python, Java and C++.
Are these real Amazon interview questions?
No — and treat any site claiming otherwise with suspicion. These are representative prompts based on public company guidance and general interview patterns. Interview content varies by role, level, team and location, and Amazon does not endorse this guide.
What should I focus on first for Amazon?
Leadership Principles, Coding and data structures, System design, Clear trade-offs. Work the question types in that order rather than grinding only coding problems: the rounds that trip people up are usually the ones they did not rehearse out loud.