Interview Experiences

Real candidates, real loops: every round, what was asked, and how it ended.

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159 stories

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AmazonSoftware Engineer
Oct 2026

Three Rounds of Graphs, System Design and Leadership Principles

I interviewed with the Agentic AI security product team under AWS. The location is Austin. Every round was 1 hour. Round 1 was a DAG topological sort. It was pretty good, pretty basic. Round 2 was another directed graph problem. This team really likes graph problems. It was something like working out what you need to make a cake, and it is very similar to a LeetCode problem. Round 3 was a traditi…

Technical Screen0
AmazonSoftware EngineerSenior+
Oct 2026

L6 Phone Screen With an Impatient Interviewer, LCA Follow-up Stuck

The interviewer was impossible to find anywhere online, I couldn't find a thing about him and I'm speechless. BQ: 1. How do you evaluate customer experience? 2. A major unexpected obstacle. For the first one, I think the point of the question was the evaluation part, and my story was just directly collecting feedback, which he wasn't happy with 😭 For the second one, he felt the obstacle wasn't ma…

Technical Screen1
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Online Assessment with a Merge-Strings Conflict Problem and an AI Spring Boot Bug-Fix Task

CODE Given two strings (lowercase English letters), primary and secondary, with lengths m and n respectively, try to merge them into one string: Keep the original order within each string A smaller character has higher priority A conflict is defined as the case where a character with low priority is merged before a character with high priority in the final merged string. For example, if the merge…

Online Assessment1
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

SDE II Phone Screen and a No-Backtrack, No-Turns Maze Problem

SDE II 09/02 Online Assessment 09/16 Phone Screen 20 minutes of deep-diving into my resume — tech stack choices, trade-offs, business logic, which part I was specifically responsible for, plus 2 Leadership Principles. 40 minutes of coding. I couldn't find the original problem online — it was a BFS reachability problem with direction vectors. X means you can't walk there, 0 means you can. Constrai…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Robot Coordination and File-Watcher Design

The author describes a first-round Amazon phone interview organized into technical questions followed by leadership-focused discussion. The applicant reports completing an initial coding problem quickly. Additional technical topics concerned coordinating multiple robots in a restaurant and designing a Kafka-related file-watching system that could handle millions of files. The robot scenario requi…

Technical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Online Assessment Coding Question on Maximizing a Bitwise AND

Fresh out of the oven. I found the coding question really confusing. I spent a long time thinking and guessing, and I guessed bitwise AND, which turned out to be wrong. Afterwards I went back over it with Claude, and the approach it gave me was greedy + bit manipulation. Here is the summary: Problem: Given an array Arr, a count K, and a budget C. You can distribute C total "capacity" as increases…

Online Assessment0
AmazonFrontend Engineer
Sep 2026

One DSA Round, Two Mediums, Rejected

I applied through a LinkedIn post for SDE I (Frontend). HR contacted me over a call and we discussed the further rounds. Round 1 (PS-DS Round) (1hr) Two DSA medium questions were asked, and I was able to solve both of them within the time limit (~40 mins). The interviewer was helpful and provided hints. Q1. Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Search Tree Q2. Ones and Zeroes Explain brute force, th…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

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 inv…

Onsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Online Assessment with a Coordinate-Compression Problem and a Debugging Task

One algorithm question, one project question, an AI-coding debug round. Q1: There are infinitely many bags in a row. Each segment [l, r, v] means bags l through r each hold v dollars. Segments do not overlap, and empty bags count as 0. Pick k consecutive bags and find the maximum total amount, mod 1e9+7. Constraints: n <= 2e5, and k and the coordinates go up to 1e9. Similar to LC 3413. Example: k…

Online Assessment0
AmazonApplied Scientist
Sep 2026

Phone Screen Covers Music Recommendation CTR System Design

Phone screen Describe yourself What's your PhD topic What's your contribution Describe a time when you deliver under tight timeline ML Given a music recommendation, how would you design a system to convert to CTR rate? How do you embed the song? How do you deal with certain features? How do you deal with extremely sparse feature? Results aren't out yet, will update as I know more. Describe an ML…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

One Virtual Onsite Round with BQ Drill-downs and a Checkout Price Engine OOD

Three BQ questions: Q1: Can you tell me about a time when you pushed back against a decision that negatively impacted your team? What was the issue? How did it turn out? Q2: Can you tell me about a time when a system was failing intermittently, and the very obvious metrics were all looking good? How did you find the root cause, and how long did it take? Q3: Can you tell me about a problem you had…

Onsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Online Assessment with a Django Debug Round

40 min Coding. It was pretty hard, the approach was greedy + bit manipulation. Feels like Amazon doesn't want to hire anyone, lol 60 min Debug. This one is tricky, so let me roughly go over my approach: The second part is an existing Django project, and you have to debug it based on the failing tests. You are not asked to write Django from scratch. The debug order I'd recommend is: Test → URL → V…

Online Assessment1
AmazonBusiness Intelligence Engineer
Sep 2026

SQL Interrupted and a Shortened Phone Screen

I'd interviewed for Amazon BIE twice before. This was my third time, and the content was different every time. There aren't many related questions shared, so I'm contributing my experience to give everyone a sense of the difficulty. SQL: Write a query to find departments where more than 50% of employees exceeded their quarterly targets, but the department's overall sales growth is below the compa…

Technical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Sep 2026

Withdrew from the SDE II Virtual Onsite

Some details have been intentionally obscured. HR reached out on LinkedIn. I ignored the first message, but then they messaged once a week for the next two weeks. I wasn't doing much, so I thought I might as well interview and see. At the end of July, I took the OA for position one and received a phone-screen invitation the next day. One question involved a drone delivering packages clockwise aro…

WithdrewOnsite1
AmazonSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

AWS Offer After Four Onsite Rounds

Timeline: July 24: HR reached out on LinkedIn; I applied. July 31: OA. August 24: Survey. September 4: BOS onsite. September 10: Verbal offer. Four back-to-back onsite rounds. First round The interviewer asked two behavioral questions: one about doing something outside my area of responsibility, and one about helping a peer who was struggling. The coding question was similar to LeetCode 1152, but…

OfferOnsite0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Passing the SDE II Phone Screen After Leadership and Palindrome Questions

I interviewed for the Amazon SDE II position on August 29, 2026. The technical phone screen lasted about an hour. Interview Questions Behavioral: 3 behavioral questions The questions were primarily focused on Amazon Leadership Principles, especially Ownership and Dive Deep I would recommend preparing specific STAR-format examples from your past projects and being ready for follow-up questions. Co…

In progressTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Leadership Principles and a Timestamp-Based LRU-Style Object

A female PM and an SDE interviewed me. They began with Leadership Principles questions: Tell me about a time when you needed to take responsibility or ownership. Tell me about a time when you faced a challenge. These were standard Leadership Principles questions. The follow-ups were about AI and impact: how many people used what I built, what my manager's reaction was, and related points. Then I…

RejectedTechnical Screen0
AmazonSoftware Engineer
Aug 2026

Four Interviews with a Train Fare Calculator and Sliding Window Max

Interview #1 — LP + DSA/OOP Leadership Principles behavioral interview, about 10–15 minutes. Then the design question: a train fare calculation system. There is one train line, G → U → H → K → I, and the fare between every two adjacent stations is 1 (for example, G to I costs 4). Implement calculateFare(start, stop) to compute the fare between two stations. Think about OOP/LLD design: where does…

Onsite0
AmazonSoftware EngineerNew Grad
Aug 2026

Binary Swaps and a Django Post Fix

I took the online assessment. It had two parts. DSA: minimum adjacent swaps for a binary array Given an array containing only 0s and 1s, rearrange it so that all 0s are at one end and all 1s are at the other. Either ordering was allowed: 000...111 or 111...000. In one move, I could swap two adjacent elements. I had to return the minimum number of moves required. For [0, 1, 0, 1], the answer was 1…

Online Assessment0
AmazonData Engineer
Added Aug 2026

BQ Plus Two Coding Questions in a Referral VO

Last week's Amazon VO, done through a referral, was BQ plus two coding questions. First the BQ part: How do you handle it when you run into difficulties at work? When your team runs into difficulties, how do you encourage them and come up with a way to solve it? Why did you choose Amazon? Coding part: Coding 1: You're given a string array words. Each word can be written as the concatenation of th…

Technical Screen0

What are interview experiences?

An interview experience is a candidate's own account of a hiring loop — not a question bank entry. It tells you the shape of the process: how many rounds there were, what each round actually tested, how long the gaps between them ran, and what the recruiter said at the end. That context is the part a question list cannot give you.

How to read them

Weight recent write-ups more heavily — interview loops change, often within a year. Read several for the same company and role rather than one: a single account tells you what one interviewer asked, while five tell you what the bar is. Note the outcome badge too, since a rejection write-up usually explains the gap far more precisely than an offer one.

Share your own

Every published experience earns 50 XP, and each of the first 3 likes it receives in a day earns you 10 XP more. Likes must come from established accounts; like-for-like swaps and likes from your own second account are not paid. Write it while the details are fresh — the round order, the exact prompts, and how much time you were given are what the next reader needs.

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