# Amazon Software Development Engineer (SDE) Interview Experiences Aced (formerly Exponent) publishes a public search API over its indexed pages; the guide is at https://www.aced.io/agents/agent-access. Source: https://www.aced.io/guides/amazon-software-development-engineer-interview/experiences Source observed: 2026-11-04T21:34:32.787Z Last checked: 2026-11-04T21:34:32.787+00:00 Indexed: 2026-11-05T01:43:11.811+00:00 --- # Amazon Software Development Engineer (SDE) Interview Experiences Updated 3 days ago by Amazon candidates. We collect real interview experiences from candidates who went through Amazon's Software Development Engineer interview process. The page contains 62 interview experiences, 250 questions, and 482 resumes. - [Expert guide](https://www.aced.io/guides/amazon-software-development-engineer-interview) - [Interview experiences (62)](https://www.aced.io/guides/amazon-software-development-engineer-interview/experiences) - [Questions (250)](https://www.aced.io/guides/amazon-software-development-engineer-interview/questions) - [Resumes (482)](https://www.aced.io/guides/amazon-software-development-engineer-interview/resumes) [Share your experience](https://www.aced.io/questions/contribute?src=guide) ## Aggregate interview signals - **Interview difficulty:** Most candidates rate the Amazon interview as **moderate**. The displayed ratings are 2 very easy, 5 easy, 34 moderate, 12 difficult, and 0 very difficult. - **Offers received:** The displayed total-compensation range is **Low: $30k; Median: $177k; High: $400k**. The median offer is about **$177k** in total compensation. - **Questions asked:** Amazon most often focuses on **Coding** and **Data Structures & Algorithms**. The displayed counts are Coding 43, Data Structures & Algorithms 42, Behavioral 20, and Other 40. ## Featured verified experience: SDE II Software Development Engineer [Read the full SDE II experience](https://www.aced.io/experiences/amazon-software-engineer-interview-39a0db?returnPath=%2Fguides%2Famazon-software-development-engineer-interview%2Fexperiences) - **Company and level:** Amazon; Mid Level / L4; United States - **Submitted:** May 12, 2026 - **Interview month:** February 2026 - **Outcome:** Got offer - **Difficulty:** Easy - **Verification:** Verified The candidate described an online assessment followed by three 40-minute interviews back to back on the same day. Amazon explained the process in advance. Technical interviews used classic problems and often began with coding rather than behavioral questions. Behavioral follow-ups examined the concrete details of the candidate's work rather than stopping at a polished STAR response. After the loop, the recruiter mainly discussed logistics such as start date and work authorization before sending the offer letter. Questions shown from this experience: - [Tell me about a time when you made a decision with limited data.](https://www.aced.io/questions/934) - [Tell me about a time you disagreed with someone and how you resolved it.](https://www.aced.io/questions/1350) - [Tell me about a time when you took ownership of a project you weren't originally responsible for.](https://www.aced.io/questions/5779) - [+9 more questions](https://www.aced.io/experiences/amazon-software-engineer-interview-39a0db?returnPath=%2Fguides%2Famazon-software-development-engineer-interview%2Fexperiences) ## Additional candidate experiences The following are candidate-submitted accounts and question excerpts. They concern different Amazon roles and interview formats. ### Software Engineer (L4) An entry-level L4 candidate described a 30-minute phone screen followed by a three-interview super day. The phone screen included one medium array problem and candidate questions. The loop included a short behavioral discussion that went deeply into the candidate's project, a graph problem, a heap problem, and low-level object-oriented design involving coupons and vouchers. - Give an example of working outside your comfort zone and gaining expertise. - Describe a time you asked more questions or dug deeper to find the root of an issue. - Construct a new array by multiplying values at corresponding positions in two arrays. ### Software Engineer Candidates described increasing rigor, multiple technical rounds, and substantial focus on Amazon Leadership Principles. Topics included Linked List Cycle and LRU Cache. Another candidate described Design DSA, high-level design, and low-level design rounds: - Implement a Trie for a recent-searches use case. - Design a BookMyShow-style ticket-booking system. - Design a link-preview feature similar to Slack or WhatsApp. - Design an event-booking system. One SDE II candidate reported an online assessment followed by three interviews, with Leadership Principles questions about projects at the start. Topics included a processing middleware framework, a difficult HackerEarth goods-management problem, and a low-level Amazon Locker design. Another candidate described a repository question in an AI-assisted round and advised using AI effectively. Other reported questions and topics included: - Longest substring without repeating characters - Construct a binary tree from preorder and inorder traversals - Remove duplicates from a string - Maximum subarray sum - Design Instagram - Segment trees - Design a file system - Design S3 - Design a rate limiter - Design an evaluation framework for ads ranking - Merge k sorted linked lists - AI-assisted coding and Spring Boot debugging - Multithreading and current technology stack ### Reported process formats Candidates reported several formats, including: - Online assessment followed by three interviews on one day - A 30-minute recruiter screen, one-hour online assessment, and a four-hour onsite with three coding rounds and one system-design round - Two one-hour interviews after an online assessment, each combining behavioral and technical discussion - A recruiter screen, online assessment with coding and Leadership Principles/work-style questions, and later live-coding interviews - A team-specific panel with three technical/behavioral rounds and a bar raiser Reported assessment content included coding problems, Leadership Principles questions, work-style simulations, repository debugging, AI-assisted coding, and competitive-programming-style problems. Candidates also mentioned low-level design, high-level design, concurrency, system trade-offs, correctness, edge cases, and time management. ### Further reported questions - Tell me about a time you made a decision with limited data. - Tell me about a time you disagreed with a team member. - Tell me about a time you took ownership of work outside your original responsibility. - Tell me about a time you missed a deadline. - Tell me about a time you raised the bar. - Tell me about a time you questioned the status quo. - Tell me about a time you made a mistake. - Why do you want to join Amazon? - Tell me about yourself. - What is the project you are most proud of? - What is your strongest technical expertise? - How do you ensure code quality? - How did you troubleshoot an issue? - How do you rally a team around an idea and gain buy-in? - Describe the most technically complex project you have worked on and explain why it was complex. - Tell me about a difficult technical stakeholder. - Explain your past projects, internships, and technology stack. ### Reported coding and design problems - Linked List Cycle - Implement LRU Cache - Implement Trie - Find the longest substring without repeating characters - Construct a binary tree from preorder and inorder traversals - Find the maximum subarray sum - Design Instagram - Design a file system - Design an Amazon Locker - Design S3 - Design a rate limiter - Design Twitter's API - Design a JSON parser - Design a parking lot - Design a system that delivers firmware updates to devices - Design a processing middleware framework that combines requests, calls another service, and returns the result - Find the lowest common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree - Find the k-th smallest element in an array - Find the top k frequent elements - Find duplicates - Reverse a linked list - Rotate a 2D matrix - Course Schedule - Rotting Oranges - Edit distance - Most Common Words - Climbing Stairs - Word Ladder - House Robber, including the circular variant - Minimum Window Substring - Maximum Number of Non-Overlapping Substrings - A graph, heap, BFS, DFS, dynamic-programming, sliding-window, segment-tree, or tree problem One submitted problem asked candidates to remove elements from either end of an array while subtracting them from `x`, returning the minimum operations needed to reach zero or `-1` if impossible. Another asked for the top three most frequently visited sequences of three webpages from timestamped customer browsing logs. A detailed sample problem concerned an integer array `quality`: replace every occurrence of one quality value with another, paying for each changed product, until every quality value is contiguous. The submitted example used `[7,7,5,7,3,5,3]` and described converting all values to `7` at a total cost of 4. Another submitted sample concerned an array `arr` and ranges `pairs`. Concatenating the selected ranges creates `efficient`; an element contributes zero if its index was selected, otherwise its efficiency is the count of values in `efficient` strictly smaller than that element. For `arr = [1, 2, 3, 2, 4, 5]` and `pairs = [[0, 1], [3, 4], [0, 0], [3, 4]]`, the submitted result was `12`. ## Accessing all experiences We provide trial access when you share your own experience. 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