Interview Experiences

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

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47 stories

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Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: missed interview and disputed absence

My interview fell apart because of a scheduling failure, not because of my answers. One interviewer never arrived. I told the recruiter and recruiting team, and provided evidence that I had been there, but I was still accused of missing the interview. I declined to reschedule and raised my concerns. After that, I was ignored and felt effectively blacklisted. The experience felt harsh and unfair b…

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Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: difficult DSA and web debugging

The online assessment was rough from the start. The first LeetCode-style problem was manageable, but the later questions quickly reached medium to hard difficulty. I completed the first, brute-forced the next, and never reached the third. Later rounds stayed heavily focused on DSA. One used hard, ad-hoc graph problems. Another asked me to debug a web app with a very limited AI assistant. It could…

Online Assessment0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: leadership principles in a virtual loop

I spoke with a recruiter and, about 90 minutes later, completed an online assessment with two coding problems. A few behavioral prompts were built into that assessment, and even then I was thinking about Amazon Leadership Principles while solving. The virtual onsite was four back-to-back rounds of roughly an hour each. It included a two-question LeetCode-style coding round with one hard and one m…

HR Screen0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: four mixed technical and leadership rounds

I had four one-hour rounds that combined behavioral questions with technical work: behavioral, low-level design, DSA, and an AI-focused behavioral and DSA round. Amazon Leadership Principles appeared throughout rather than as an afterthought. The DSA portions used classic LeetCode-style problems. One technical conversation also went into networking, with follow-ups that deepened each answer. I us…

Technical Screen0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: linked-list final after coding

I cleared an initial coding round by solving two questions, then moved to one technical interview lasting about an hour. That interview had a single linked-list question, and the setup felt straightforward compared with the earlier assessment. I was still rejected. What stayed with me was how quickly one problem became the final decision. There was not much room to recover from even a slight mism…

RejectedOnline Assessment0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Software Engineer interview at Amazon Advertising: interview experience

The process had three stages and placed Amazon leadership principles alongside coding. I did not complete the first stage. It began with two coding questions under set time limits and then moved to a workstyle assessment. The later format, as I understood it from the process, involved one or two technical rounds with DSA-heavy problems and leadership-principle prompts throughout. In my own DSA-fo…

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Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Software Engineer interview at Amazon Advertising

This four-round loop was about DSA execution and being thorough with edge cases. Early on, I saw ordinary algorithm questions alongside an AI-assisted, repo-based coding task. I could usually find the central DSA idea, but I did not get all the edge cases right or leave enough time to debug. The later rounds kept the same theme, with coding problems at different levels and behavioral moments mixe…

Rejected0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: DSA and work style

The on-campus process had two standardized rounds, each with a live DSA coding problem and Amazon work-style questions. The coding was assessed for correctness and for how I reasoned about time and space complexity. The behavioral part used Leadership Principles such as Ownership, Bias for Action, and Customer Obsession. Those prompts followed a 'tell me about a time' format, so I answered with S…

Other0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: open-ended behavioral loop

My interview had two distinct parts. One leaned more behavioral than I expected, and another was a LeetCode-style technical question. The behavioral prompts were situational. Instead of asking for polished, closed-form answers, they asked me to explain how I would think through open-ended scenarios. Communication became central because it felt like they wanted my reasoning, not just a final concl…

Onsite0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: ambiguous practical programming task

The questions were practical programming prompts rather than textbook-only coding. The first was fairly trivial math. The second was interactive: I had to work out what the interviewer wanted, then implement several functions to make it work. That second task stretched me because it required clarification and interpretation. I had to check my understanding early and keep iterating until the imple…

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Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Streams and rate limiting

My process focused on data structures and low-level reasoning, with leadership and workplace questions alongside them. There was no bar raiser, so it felt less like a large gauntlet and more like direct technical checks plus LP questions. The OA included simulation-style grouping and sorting. In live interviews, I worked on finding the median of an integer stream and the K most frequent elements…

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Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Time-boxed debugging

The memorable part of my process was a take-home-style coding and debugging assignment. It began with HackerRank-like tasks in about 40 minutes, followed by a debugging section. In one version, I spent about an hour fixing an unexpected API-call behavior in a repository-style project so every test would pass. It was difficult because it resembled real work: I had to find why a larger codebase did…

Rejected0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: Two Sum and substring

The process began with an OA containing two DSA questions and behavioral questions. One was an easy Two Sum-style problem; the other was the medium problem of finding the longest substring without repeating characters. I then had one interview with two more easy-to-medium DSA questions. The live round followed the same pattern: use familiar techniques cleanly under time pressure and explain the r…

OfferOnline Assessment0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: STAR stories and two design questions

I started with an online assessment containing two coding problems, one more algorithmic and the other more mathematical, plus a short work-style survey. After I passed it, I had a phone interview focused entirely on behavioral questions. I used STAR to describe past experiences and had to be deliberate about setting up each story, explaining what I'd done and giving the results. After that scree…

Online Assessment0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: delayed New York onsite

After the OA, I waited about three months before Amazon Advertising invited me to an onsite in New York. The onsite was condensed into back-to-back rounds: SWE-style interviews followed by a managerial round. The long delay cost me some momentum before the loop began. Once it started, the technical conversations were straightforward, and the manager-adjacent discussion looked at how I would opera…

Online Assessment0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: four-round loop and bar raiser

After clearing the initial step, I entered a loop with multiple back-to-back interviews. It was the most intense part of the process. I had four rounds, each combining behavioral questions with a technical component, except for one that leaned behavioral-only as a structured readout of how I would operate. The technical topics included strings, priority queues, and object-oriented design. A bar-r…

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Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer interview: large project under artificial time pressure

The interview felt deliberately brutal and high-pressure. The format was streamlined, but it mixed behavioral and technical questions with an artificial time constraint, something like 60 minutes for a massive project. It felt designed to see whether I would break under pressure and matched the reputation I associated with a high-attrition hiring model, even though the process itself was not chao…

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Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Sliding window, binary search, and debugging

After completing my OA, I moved into a live technical screen with LeetCode-style problems. One used sliding-window logic and another used binary search. There was also a leadership-expectations conversation where I described a time I debugged an error: what went wrong, how I investigated it, and what I changed to prevent it from happening again. The pace was quick, so I had to stay with the main…

Online Assessment0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: Medium coding under a compressed but supportive schedule

My process began with a thorough, tightly paced phone interview. Segments ran back to back. I first worked through two medium LeetCode questions, each followed by probing about how I approached the problem end to end. Then I did workplace-style behavioral questions and a quick personality-type check about how I work and where I see my strengths. What stood out was the interviewers' tone. Even wit…

Technical Screen0
Amazon AdvertisingSoftware Engineer
Reported Jul 2026

Amazon Advertising Software Engineer Interview Experience: A four-part OA with AI-assisted debugging

I started with an online assessment in four parts. First was a 40-minute HackerRank coding test with standard DSA questions. Second was 60 minutes of AI-assisted coding in a project-repository environment, where I had to trace a simple bug, such as why a request was not committing to the database. The available options included Node.js, Springboot, C++, and Django. Third came 30 minutes of workpl…

Online Assessment0

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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