Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience
Amazon · Entry level
Interview process
My overall Amazon New Grad SDE interview process was rigorous and fairly challenging. I had three rounds covering coding, Leadership Principles, and low-level design. The coding questions were not just about getting to a solution, but also about understanding long problem statements, handling edge cases, and explaining my thought process clearly. What went well was that I was able to work through the problems, respond to hints, and connect my past experiences to Amazon’s Leadership Principles with specific examples. The LP discussions were also very detailed, with multiple follow-ups that pushed me to explain tradeoffs, ownership, business impact, and how I handled feedback. What did not go as smoothly was the scheduling and communication. All three interviews were initially planned for the same day, but the third round was rescheduled on the day itself and happened around 15 days later. I also was not introduced to the interviewers beforehand, and the process felt mostly automated, so it required a lot of independent preparation
Interview rounds · 1
- 1
Final / onsite round
BehavioralCodingSystem Design- Q1. Given a log file with [timestamp, customer_id, webpage], determine the top 3 most frequently visited sequences of 3 webpages across all customers.
Tips from the candidate
For the behavioral part, I would prepare several strong STAR stories around ownership, dive deep, delivering results under pressure, learning quickly, handling feedback, and making tradeoffs. The follow-ups can get very specific, so each story should include technical details, business impact, what went wrong, and what you personally did.
Company culture
What stood out most was how strongly Amazon evaluates ownership, depth, and customer impact. The interviewers seemed to care not only about whether I could solve a coding problem, but also whether I could reason through ambiguity, communicate tradeoffs, and take responsibility for outcomes. The Leadership Principle questions made the culture feel very execution-focused and detail-oriented. Even in a new grad process, they expected clear examples of delivering results, learning from feedback, and going beyond assigned responsibilities when needed.