Amazon Interview Questions
The coding and system-design questions asked in Amazon interviews - with worked solutions, in-browser code execution, and active-recall review. 12 questions.
How Amazon interviews software engineers
Amazon's SDE loop opens with an online assessment (coding plus work-style simulations on HackerRank), then a phone screen, then an onsite of four to six rounds. The whole process usually takes four to eight weeks.
Every round is half technical and half Leadership Principles: each interviewer owns a couple of LPs and probes them with behavioral questions in the STAR format. The loop includes a Bar Raiser - a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team who safeguards the hiring bar and effectively holds veto power.
The interview loop
- 1Online assessment~70-90 min on HackerRank: two coding problems plus work-simulation and work-style sections.
- 2Phone screenCoding interview with an engineer plus Leadership Principles questions.
- 3Onsite loop4-6 rounds of coding and system design, each paired with LP behavioral questions.
- 4Bar RaiserA separate round led by a trained interviewer outside the team who guards the hiring bar.
What they look for
- Solid DS&A plus practical system design for mid-level and up
- Leadership Principles evidence in every answer, structured as STAR stories
- Ownership and customer obsession come through clearly
How to prepare
- Prepare 8-12 STAR stories mapped explicitly to the 16 Leadership Principles.
- Expect LP questions inside technical rounds, not just the behavioral one.
- Treat the Bar Raiser seriously - it carries outsized weight in the decision.
Sources
- Amazon Jobs - software development interview topics - Official guidance on what the rounds cover.
- Amazon Jobs - SDE online assessment prep - Official OA format and expectations.
- IGotAnOffer - Amazon SDE interview - Loop structure, Bar Raiser, and LP prep.
See every company's references on the interview-process sources page.
Practice questions
- Weather App
Design a forecast app like the Google or Apple weather app - one screen for the current location, a forecast that loads instantly from cache, an honest offline state, and a constrained background refresh.
Mobileeasy-1mo
+2 - Feature Flag SDK(premium)
Design a LaunchDarkly-lite / Firebase Remote Config-lite Android SDK - typed flag evaluation that never throws, deterministic bucketing on user attributes, SSE push refresh with polling fallback, and a global kill switch that outranks targeting.
Mobilemedium-2mo
- Messenger App(premium)
Design an Android messenger - a durable outbox so a tapped message survives a kill, a server-assigned per-chat seq so order is a property of the data, reconnect catch-up, and FCM wakeup for offline recipients.
Mobilehard-2mo
+5 - Photo Gallery App(premium)
Design a Google Photos-style gallery - one timeline over the device and cloud libraries, background backup, full-resolution viewing, fresh-device restore.
Mobilehard-1mo+3 - Music Player App(premium)
Design a Spotify-lite Android player - adaptive HLS/DASH streaming, gapless playback via the Media3 playlist API, background playback as a MediaSessionService that lights up Auto / Wear / lockscreen, offline downloads with Widevine DRM, audio focus, and resume-position persistence.
Mobilehard-2mo
- Doc Editor App(premium)
Design a Google Docs-style collaborative editor on Android - local-first keystrokes, conflict-free merge across hours-long offline gaps, reconnect catch-up, and 100k-character documents at 60 fps.
Mobilehard-2mo
- Newsfeed App(premium)
Design an Android social feed - opaque cursor pagination over Paging 3 + RemoteMediator, optimistic engagement with idempotent retries, 60 FPS mixed-media scrolling with autoplay video, and pull-to-refresh that surfaces new posts without losing the reading position.
Mobilehard-2mo
+7 - Ride-Sharing App(premium)
Design an Uber / Lyft-lite Android rider app - a server-authoritative ride state machine, an idempotent ride request that survives a process kill, a 1-2 Hz driver-location stream interpolated to 60 FPS, FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) wakeup when the WebSocket is closed, and reconnect-and-reconcile under cellular drops.
Mobilehard-2mo+4 - Valid Parentheses
Stack-walk a bracket string to validate it, then localize the first error, then find the longest valid substring (LC 32).
Practicalmedium35m2mo+12 - Find Duplicate Files(premium)
Group identical files by content. Stream-hash to keep memory bounded, then add size pre-filtering and an opt-in symlink/min-size policy.
Practicalmedium45m2mo
+4 - Time-Based Key-Value Store(premium)
A key-value store with timestamped writes. Read at time t returns the latest value written at or before t; later phases add arbitrary-order inserts and range queries.
Practicalmedium35m2mo
+9 - Meeting Rooms(premium)
Given a list of half-open meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms; later phases assign specific room IDs and add capped capacity with priority eviction.
Practicalmedium35m2mo+9