Amazon Software Development Engineer interview questions
based on 3.4K ratings - Updated Jul 1, 2026
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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 online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2011
Interview
I had applied for the position online and was contacted by the HR for a phone screen. I had three phone interviews but got a rejection after the third interview. Two of the interviews were very encouraging but didn't have a good experience with the third one. The interview consisted of some conceptual interviews and some programming too. Even though I received a rejection, I would say that it was a good learning experience
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a program for the longest possible palindrome and write test cases to break it.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jul 2011
Interview
After posting my resume on a couple different job boards, a recruiter from Amazon contacted me, explaining the company felt I would be a good fit for a Software Development position. I sent them some availabilities for a phone interview, and one was set up for the following week.
The interviewer called promptly, but did not introduce himself, which made hanging up when we were finished a little awkward. The interview itself lasted forty-five minutes and consisted of three technical questions prefaced by a request to describe myself. Oddly enough, it was that description that threw me off more than any of the technical questions.
Each of the three questions were surprisingly easy. The first one stumped me initially and I was asked to solve it after the phone interview and email my code to the interviewer. The problem dealt with recursion and I think my nerves prevented me from keeping my head straight. Once off the phone, however, it was a breeze.
The second and third questions were both simpler than I had expected, and I overcomplicated my solution to one. The recruiter pointed this out and I was able to quickly simplify.
While interviewing with Amazon seemed really intimidating, the interviewer made it clear early on I was to use him as a resource in developing solutions; we were supposed to brainstorm together to come up with solutions.
I will say, though, that the interviewer had something of an accent and phrased things a little strangely. During the problem that stumped me, I think he became rather irritated with me for not understanding what he was trying to say.
I have a second phone interview scheduled. Hopefully I'll be able to make it through this one as well.
Given an array of integers and an integer k, find all possible k-tuples of the array such that no k-tuple uses any index of the array more than once.
For example, given the array {1, 2, 3} and the integer k, the k-tuples returned would be:
1, 2
1, 3
2, 3
but 1, 1 would not be permitted.
The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jul 2011
Interview
They sent me an email stating that they would like to set up an interview for the position of Software Development Engineer I. Seemed like they were pretty adiment about interviewing me because this was the second person that tried to interview me over about a month. The phone interview was technical in nature. They asked questions about Data Structures, Algorithms, Object Oriented Programming and Design (at Amazon they primarily use C++, Java, Perl, Ruby), and Problem Solving. The final part of the interview was a coding exercise. The interview in total lasted about 45 minutes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Say you had a dictionary of words. How would you set it up? And what would you do if you needed to search for a word (what type of search)? About how long would it take for you to search for the word using Big O notation?