Amazon Software Engineer Interview Experience — Four Rounds with Detailed Behavioral Questions

The author describes four Amazon virtual-onsite interviews for an SDE2 role, each combining behavioral discussion with technical work. The technical topics were dependency ordering and selective reruns, a high-volume inventory-update service, an extensible document-search library, and merging timestamp-ordered event streams without loading everything into memory.

Behavioral questions examined investigation, decisions under deadlines, disagreement, initiative, customer needs, motivation, and project impact. The author emphasizes that these discussions demanded detailed examples and left relatively little time for coding and system design. After sleeping poorly before the interviews, the applicant felt tired and judged their design performance as weak. The author expected an unfavorable result but did not describe receiving a decision.