Amazon Software Development Engineer interview questions
based on 3.4K ratings - Updated Jul 1, 2026
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Amazon interviews FAQs
Candidates applying for Software Development Engineer roles take an average of 21 days to get hired, when considering 2 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Amazon overall takes an average of 42 days.
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I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2013
Interview
I was approached by a recruiter who then sent my resume over to the Hiring dept. They were prompt and scheduled the interview within a week.
There were 4 technical rounds and 1 with HR. All the interviewees were personable and friendly. A lot of the questions involved coding. They walked me through many of the problems and asked questions as I was coding. They wanted to understand my thought process. If I strayed or did something wrong, they'd ask questions to indicate it. Fairly standard questions on algorithms. Definitely prepare for graph, tree algorithms, data structures and be prepared to justify a choice for a data structure. The interviewers didn't particularly care about syntax, but they want to see that you are comfortable putting pen to paper.
Also be prepared with atleast 5-6 questions you want to ask them. I ran out of these and it became awkward towards the end!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a large web-based, highly scalable, highly available system. This was an open-ended question. You should make sure to ask the interviewer lots of questions to narrow down the problem before jumping into a solution.
I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2013
Interview
Started with two phone interviews, mostly algorithmic questions plus one design question. Then an onsite interview with 4 member of the team I would join in addition to one outsider.
I did well on the interviews. For a couple of them I finished the main question quickly and the interviewer had to come up with additional questions for the remaining time.
However, later the recruiter called me and asked about my visa sponsorship requirement and export control license (I needed both). Finally I was told that Amazon has recently decided not to hire nationals of certain countries (including Iran) because it provides cloud services to the government. So unfortunately I couldn't get the job.