Amazon's SDE II loop has four 55-minute interviews; SDE III has five. Both assess technical skills and experience through Amazon's Leadership Principles, often in the same session. An interviewer may ask two or three behavioral questions about a past success or failure, depending on how much technical ground the session covers. Prepare strong examples, working code, and clear trade-offs at the level of the role.

What to Expect: Amazon Interview Process

The sequence depends on the level and team. Amazon's SDE III guide describes a 60-minute phone screen split between Leadership Principles questions and either coding or system design. SDE II candidates can expect at least one software system design problem. Coding answers must be syntactically correct, scalable, robust, and tested; pseudocode is not accepted.

A single session may combine coding, low-level design, high-level system design, and Leadership Principles. Clarify requirements, write executable code, test edge cases, and explain complexity. For design, define responsibilities and APIs before discussing storage, traffic, failures, observability, and trade-offs.

Amazon also includes a Bar Raiser. This trained interviewer sits outside the hiring team and helps apply consistent standards. A Bar Raiser may lead a behavioral, coding, or design session, so the title does not reveal the format.

How to Prepare and Pass Amazon Interviews

Give yourself four to six weeks if your fundamentals are current. Plan for eight to twelve weeks if you're rebuilding graph algorithms, object-oriented design, or distributed systems.

• Build a story bank. Prepare examples about customer impact, disagreement, failure, ownership, ambiguous decisions, and measurable results.
• Practice full coding sessions. Clarify requirements, write executable code, test normal and failure cases, and explain what you would improve with one more hour.
• Match depth to level. SDE I emphasizes clean code, SDE II adds component design and trade-offs, and SDE III requires system-level architectural judgment and leadership beyond one component.

Practice a mixed Amazon loop on Lodely: answer a coding question, then a system design question, then a Leadership Principles question.

Amazon Interview Questions

Recently asked in real interviews

These questions were asked recently in real Amazon interviews. Practice these and 4,000+ other questions from 1,000+ companies on Lodely.

Playlist

algorithms Easy

Design a rate limiter.

system-design Medium

Tell me about a time when you went above and beyond for a customer.

behavioral Medium

Given two strings s and t, return true if t is an anagram of s, and false otherwise.

algorithmscoding Easy

Design a reservation and payment system for a parking garage.

system-design Medium

Course Schedule

algorithmscoding Medium

Subarray Sum Equals K

algorithmscoding Medium

Tell me about a time when you had a disagreement with your manager.

behavioralpeople-management Medium

Move all zeros to the end of an array.

algorithmscoding Easy

Design a URL shortener.

system-design Medium

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Amazon Interview Breakdown

Playlist

names = ["song1","song2","song3"], durations = [3,4,2], target = 7

["song1","song2"]

names = ["a","b","c","d"], durations = [1,6,2,5], target = 7

["a","b"]

Type: Array and hash-map coding question.

The Trick: Return two distinct songs whose durations add to a target. Clarify whether duplicate durations are allowed, and use a hash map without reusing the same song.

What It Tests: Requirement clarification, data-structure choice, duplicate handling, and complexity analysis.

Design a Rate Limiter

Type: Distributed system design.

The Trick: Local counters diverge when traffic moves across servers. Define the rate-limit key, algorithm, shared state, and whether the service fails open or closed when that state is unavailable.

What It Tests: Distributed state, consistency, atomic updates, hot keys, failure policy, and operations.

Tell Me About a Time You Went Above and Beyond for a Customer

Type: Behavioral question covering Customer Obsession and Ownership.

The Trick: Choose a real customer need, explain why the normal path was insufficient, and focus on your decisions and measurable result.

What It Tests: Initiative, scope, customer judgment, tangible impact, and the cost of your decision.

The remaining questions are:

• Valid Anagram tests frequency counting and input assumptions.
• Parking Garage Reservation and Payment System covers availability, reservation consistency, payment reliability, and partial failures.
• Course Schedule tests graph modeling and cycle detection with DFS, BFS, or dependency counting.
• Subarray Sum Equals K uses prefix sums and frequency counting because negative values make a simple sliding window unreliable.
• Disagreement With Your Manager covers "Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit" and "Earn Trust."
• Move Zeroes tests pointer invariants while preserving the order of nonzero values.
• Design a URL Shortener covers identifiers, redirects, storage, caching, expiration, abuse prevention, and read-heavy traffic.

What Comes After The Interview

Each interviewer submits independent feedback before the debrief. Amazon targets a final decision within five business days, although team availability, logistics, and holidays can cause delays. If you receive an offer, compare cash, sign-on bonuses, and stock awards year by year because the reported RSU schedule is backloaded at 5%, 15%, 40%, and 40%.

Reported U.S. median total compensation updated August 27, 2026, was $188,000 for L4 SDE I, $273,000 for L5 SDE II, $392,000 for L6 SDE III, and $685,000 for L7 Principal SDE. If the final level differs from what you expected, ask how the interview evidence affected it before assessing the package.

Candidate Experiences

One recent U.S. SDE II candidate described strong performance on data-structures questions but a rejection after showing insufficient depth in low-level and high-level design. The candidate's takeaway was to time-box clarification, define responsibilities earlier, and reserve enough time to implement. Prepare to demonstrate the design depth expected at your level as clearly as your coding skill.

Conclusion

Amazon evaluates working code, defensible design decisions, and evidence from your experience. Practice mixed Amazon loops on Lodely and answer follow-up questions under time pressure.