Amazon

Updated July 12, 2026 · techinterview.org

Interview Process Overview

Amazon’s interview process is unique in its heavy emphasis on the company’s 16 Leadership Principles. Technical skills are important, but cultural fit and demonstration of these principles are equally critical to success.

What to Expect

Online Assessment (OA): Many candidates start with a 90-minute online coding assessment featuring 2 algorithmic problems and sometimes work simulation questions. This screens for basic coding ability.

Technical Phone Screen (1 round): 1-hour interview with coding and behavioral questions. You’ll solve one algorithmic problem while discussing your approach, then answer behavioral questions tied to Leadership Principles.

Onsite Loop (5-6 rounds):

• Coding Rounds (2-3): Medium difficulty algorithm problems. Amazon prefers solutions that work over perfectly optimized code. Expect questions on strings, arrays, trees, and graphs.
• System Design (1 round): Design scalable systems like e-commerce platforms, recommendation engines, or distributed storage. Focus on reliability and cost optimization.
• Behavioral/Bar Raiser (2-3 rounds): Deep-dive into past experiences using STAR method. The Bar Raiser is a specially trained interviewer who ensures high hiring standards.

Leadership Principles Focus

Amazon interviews revolve around their 16 Leadership Principles. Prepare 2-3 stories for each:

• Customer Obsession: Starting with the customer and working backwards. Interviewers want a story where you pushed for the customer even when it cost you time or political capital; name the metric you moved and how you knew it mattered to them.
• Ownership: Acting on behalf of the entire company, thinking long-term. Expect follow-ups about a time you fixed something outside your job description or owned a failure instead of pointing at another team. Stories where you handed the problem off tend to score poorly.
• Invent and Simplify: Finding new solutions and keeping things simple. Have an example where you removed steps, cut a dependency, or replaced a manual process with automation, and be ready to explain why simpler was actually better, not just newer.
• Dive Deep: Operating at all levels and auditing frequently. Interviewers probe whether you looked at the data yourself, so cite the specific metric, log, or query that led you to the root cause rather than a summary someone handed you.
• Bias for Action: Taking calculated risks and valuing speed. Pick a story where you moved without full information and explain how you capped the downside — a reversible choice, a small experiment, or a quick rollback. Amazon frames these as two-way-door decisions.
• Deliver Results: Focusing on key inputs and delivering quality outcomes. Use a story with a hard deadline or a setback you pushed through, and quantify the outcome. Expect them to dig into what almost derailed it and exactly what you did.

Common Question Topics

• Arrays/Strings: Rotation, sliding window, substring problems. Variable-window questions like longest substring without repeating characters are common, along with two-pointer problems on sorted input. State your time and space complexity before you start coding.
• Trees: Binary tree operations, BST validation, tree traversals. Know recursive and iterative traversals cold, and practice level-order since problems are often framed as processing the tree layer by layer. The usual BST-validation trap is checking only immediate children instead of enforcing a valid min/max range down each path.
• Graphs: BFS, DFS, shortest path (Dijkstra’s algorithm). Most Amazon graph problems are grid or adjacency-list traversals — number of islands, word ladder, course scheduling — so model the problem as a graph first and track visited nodes to avoid revisiting or cycles.
• Dynamic Programming: Optimization problems, memoization. Start from the brute-force recursion, spot the repeated subproblems, then add memoization or a bottom-up table. Common variants include coin change, house robber, and counting paths through a grid.
• System Design: E-commerce systems, inventory management, distributed databases. For a cart or inventory design, be ready to explain how you keep counts consistent under concurrent orders and where you would cache or shard. They care more about reliability, cost, and clear tradeoffs than naming exotic components.

Preparation Tips

1. Master Leadership Principles: Have 15-20 STAR stories ready covering different principles. Be specific about your individual contribution.
2. Practice Working Code: Amazon wants code that works, even if not optimal. Test your solutions thoroughly.
3. Focus on Medium Problems: Amazon rarely asks extremely difficult algorithmic questions. Consistency matters more than brilliance.
4. Think About Scale: In system design, emphasize reliability, cost optimization, and handling millions of customers.
5. Prepare Questions: Ask about team dynamics, projects, and how teams embody Leadership Principles.

Interview Culture

Amazon values frugality, ownership, and customer obsession. Demonstrate long-term thinking, willingness to dive into details, and bias for action. The Bar Raiser interview is particularly important – this person has veto power and ensures you raise the bar for Amazon’s talent level.

Last Updated: February 2026