How Amazon Interviews in 2026: Process, Questions & What They Score
The complete process, reported questions, and what interviewers score.
Amazon / Interview snapshot
8
stages from
application to offer
50
reported questions
23
public sources
Independent: SupaCV is not affiliated with or endorsed by Amazon. This is one well-documented shape of Amazon's interviews, not a script: processes change and vary by role, team, level, and region, so confirm specifics with your recruiter.
On this page
01 / For every Amazon candidate
The process, start to finish.
Amazon's hiring process for technical (software development engineer / SDE) roles is a multi-stage funnel built around two things: technical ability (coding, and system design for more senior levels) and cultural fit against Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles (LPs). From the phone screen onward, nearly every live interviewer is trained to probe specific LPs alongside technical skill, and a "Bar Raiser," an interviewer from outside the hiring team with effective veto power, sits in the final loop specifically to keep the hiring bar consistent.
The full process (first recruiter contact to signed offer) commonly takes 3 weeks to 2 months, though this varies significantly by role, level, team urgency, and whether reference/background checks add delay. Details below are drawn from career-coaching sites (IGotAnOffer, Interview Kickstart, TechPrep, Exponent), Amazon's own careers site (amazon.jobs, aboutamazon.com), and aggregated candidate-report sites (Glassdoor, onsites.fyi, LeetCode/DesignGurus); exact stage count, number of onsite rounds, and whether the OA/phone screen is skipped vary by level (new grad vs. experienced SDE1/2/3+) and by team, so treat specifics as directionally accurate rather than fixed for every requisition.
Stage 1: Resume screen / recruiter outreach
Days to a couple of weeks to get scheduled
A recruiter identifies or reviews a candidate (via application or outreach on LinkedIn) and does an initial eligibility check. This is the highest-elimination stage of the funnel.
Stage 2: Recruiter screen
15-30 minutes
A short call where the recruiter asks about background, motivation for Amazon, logistics (location, visa, comp expectations) and gives an overview of the process; not usually a deep technical or LP evaluation.
Stage 3: Online Assessment (OA)
Roughly 90-120 minutes total (varies by role; commonly broken into a ~20-30 min debugging section, a ~70-min coding section, and a separate 10-30 min work-simulation/workstyle survey)
A timed, proctored test on HackerRank, most commonly used for new-grad/intern hiring and sometimes for experienced hires. Reported to include 1-2 LeetCode-style coding problems (medium-hard), a 'work simulation' section with scenario-based judgment questions, and a workstyle/personality survey mapped to the Leadership Principles.
Stage 4: Technical phone screen
45-60 minutes
A live virtual interview (often over Amazon Chime) with one engineer, typically one coding problem plus a handful of behavioral/LP questions. For senior or experienced-hire roles this stage sometimes replaces the OA rather than following it; strong OA performers or some new-grad candidates occasionally have this stage skipped.
Stage 5: Interview loop / virtual 'onsite'
One day; commonly 4-5 rounds at SDE1/SDE2 (L4/L5) and 5-6 rounds at senior levels (L6+), with some streamlined loops running fewer
The main evaluation stage, now conducted virtually for most candidates: back-to-back 45-60 minute sessions in a single day, each led by a different interviewer who owns specific technical topics and specific Leadership Principles. Loops commonly include 1-2 coding rounds, one or more system design / OO design rounds (design rounds become more prominent at SDE2 and above), and dedicated behavioral/LP rounds. One interviewer in the loop is a Bar Raiser: someone from outside the immediate hiring team, trained to reduce bias and hold the hiring bar consistent, and who holds effective veto power over the hire decision.
One interviewer in the loop is a Bar Raiser: someone from outside the immediate hiring team, trained to reduce bias and hold the hiring...
Stage 6: Interviewer debrief / hiring committee
Behind the scenes; candidates typically hear back within about a week
All loop interviewers (including the Bar Raiser) meet to share written feedback and debate the hire/no-hire decision. The Bar Raiser chairs this debrief and, together with the hiring manager, must both be inclined to hire for an offer to move forward; this is meant to counter groupthink and deference to the most senior voice in the room.
Stage 7: Reference checks
~15-20 minutes per call; roughly a week to complete
Recruiter or team contacts 1-2+ professional references (former managers, peers). This step is reported inconsistently across candidates: more common and more rigorous for senior roles, sometimes skipped or folded into background checks for junior/new-grad hires.
Stage 8: Offer and negotiation
1-2+ days after references clear, though negotiation can extend this
Recruiter extends a verbal/written offer with compensation package; a compensation committee may review adjustments if the candidate negotiates.
Reported interview time, one scale in minutes
Where the minutes go
- Recruiter screen15 to 30 min
- Online Assessment~90 to 120 min
- Technical phone screen45 to 60 min
- Reference checks~15 to 20 min
Not drawn: Resume screen / recruiter outreach, Interview loop / virtual 'onsite', Interviewer debrief / hiring committee and Offer and negotiation, whose durations are not given in minutes.
02 / What Amazon scores
Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles
01
Customer Obsession
02
Ownership
03
Invent and Simplify
04
Are Right, A Lot
05
Learn and Be Curious
06
Hire and Develop the Best
07
Insist on the Highest Standards
08
Think Big
09
Bias for Action
10
Frugality
11
Earn Trust
12
Dive Deep
13
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
14
Deliver Results
15
Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
16
Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
According to aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles and amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles, this is the complete, current, officially named 16-item list, used consistently across all roles and levels, not just engineering. The first 14 principles were in place by 2015 (with 'Learn and Be Curious' added as the 14th); 'Strive to be Earth's Best Employer' and 'Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility' were added on July 1, 2021, bringing the total to 16; no further additions have been confirmed since.
Every interviewer in the loop is typically assigned specific LPs to probe via behavioral questions, and Amazon's online assessment includes a 'workstyle' survey explicitly built around these principles. Candidates are coached to map every behavioral story to one or more named LPs rather than answering generically.
03 / Coach's notes
Coach's tips.
01
Build a tight bank of 8-10 STAR stories (Situation, Task, Action, Result) before the loop, each mapped to one or more of the 16 named Leadership Principles, and explicitly reference the relevant LP in your answer rather than leaving the interviewer to infer it.
02
Prepare specifically for 'conflict' and 'failure' style prompts (e.g., disagreeing with a decision, leaving something unfinished, making a call without full data) since these map to less-obvious LPs like Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit and Bias for Action, and are repeatedly cited as under-prepared-for by candidates.
03
Quantify outcomes in every story (metrics, scale, business impact): Amazon interviewers and Bar Raisers are trained to probe for concrete, data-backed results rather than vague descriptions of involvement.
04
Treat the online assessment's 'work simulation'/workstyle section as seriously as the coding problems: it is explicitly scored against the Leadership Principles, so review all 16 LPs before sitting it, not just before the behavioral loop rounds.
05
Remember one interviewer in the loop will be a Bar Raiser from outside your hiring team whose job is to check whether you'd be better than at least half of Amazon's existing employees at that level, and who can effectively veto a hire the rest of the panel favors; treat every round as equally consequential rather than assuming only the 'hiring manager round' matters.
06
For SDE2+ and senior candidates, expect system/OO design (e.g., TinyURL, rate limiter, parking lot) to carry real weight alongside coding: practice explicitly stating assumptions, discussing trade-offs out loud, and scaling a design rather than jumping straight to an architecture diagram.
04 / The research
Where this page comes from.
Compiled from public sources across 14 sites. Amazon's own page is among them: amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles.
- sites
- 14
- coaching and prep guides
- 18
- Amazon's own pages
- 3
- candidate reports and forums
- 2
Source composition
Where the research comes from
Grouped by the kind of site that published each source: Amazon's own domain, candidate forums, and everything else.
- Coaching and prep guides18
- Amazon's own pages3
- Candidate reports and forums2
05 / The questions
Reported questions, by category.
Showing questions for
Roles are grouped by the category each question fits, not by the source.
Coding / Data Structures & Algorithms
14 questions
Two Sum (find pairs in an array summing to a target)
Tests hash-map lookup for pair sums; the one-pass O(n) solution is the expected baseline.
Number of Islands (find/count connected land regions in a 2D grid via DFS/BFS)
Tests grid DFS/BFS flood fill with visited marking; count each land component exactly once.
Design and implement an LRU Cache
Tests hash map plus doubly linked list to achieve O(1) get and put with correct eviction order.
Reorder Data in Log Files (parsing/sorting mixed log entries)
Tests custom sort comparators and stable sorting over mixed letter and digit log entries.
Word Break (determine if a string can be segmented into dictionary words)
Tests dynamic programming over prefixes with a dictionary set; memoization avoids exponential recursion.
Task Scheduler (schedule tasks with cooldown constraints)
Tests greedy reasoning around the most frequent task; the idle-slot formula is the key insight.
Sliding Window Maximum
Tests the monotonic deque technique for O(n) window maximums instead of rescanning each window.
Valid Anagram / string manipulation problems
Tests character-frequency counting with a hash map or fixed-size count array and clean string handling.
Identify the Largest Outlier in an Array
Tests careful problem clarification plus a linear scan; pin down the outlier definition before coding.
Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters
Tests a sliding window with a last-seen index map; jump the left bound past the previous occurrence instead of restarting the window.
Merge Intervals (combine overlapping ranges)
Tests sorting by start time then merging in one pass; compare each interval against the last one already merged, not the previous input interval.
Search in Rotated Sorted Array
Tests binary search on a pivoted array; each step decides which half is sorted before choosing where to continue.
Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree
Tests post-order recursion that returns the first node where the two targets are found in different subtrees.
Critical Connections in a Network (find the bridges in a graph)
Tests Tarjan's bridge finding with discovery and low-link times; a reported OA problem that is harder than the usual medium.
Reported problems, listed so you know what to expect. Practice them in your own editor or on the platform you prefer; SupaCV's practice mode coaches how you talk through them.
System / Object-Oriented Design
10 questions
Design TinyURL (a URL shortening service)
System design staple: short-code generation, collision handling, and read-heavy redirect scaling.
Design a parking lot system
Object-oriented design: class modeling for spots and vehicles, allocation strategy, and extensibility.
Design an elevator system for a multi-story building
Object-oriented design: request scheduling across cars, per-car state machines, and minimizing wait time.
Design a rate limiter
System design: token bucket or sliding window, per-client keys, and distributed counter consistency.
Design a file upload/download service
System design: chunked uploads, blob storage, metadata service, resumability, and CDN-backed downloads.
Design a search/autocomplete feature
System design: trie or prefix index, suggestion ranking, and low-latency caching.
Design a notification or messaging service
System design: fan-out strategy, queueing, retries with idempotency, and delivery guarantees across channels.
Design a distributed message queue (e.g. SQS)
Tests durability, at-least-once delivery, visibility timeouts, and the ordering versus throughput trade-off.
Design an e-commerce order and inventory system
Tests consistency on inventory decrement, idempotent checkout, and splitting a read-heavy catalog from write-heavy orders.
Design a video streaming service (e.g. Prime Video)
Tests CDN and adaptive bitrate delivery, transcoding pipelines, and how playback state survives a client reconnect.
Reported problems, listed so you know what to expect. Practice them in your own editor or on the platform you prefer; SupaCV's practice mode coaches how you talk through them.
Every role
Behavioral / Leadership Principles
22 questions
Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for a customer
Tell me about a time you took on something outside your job description and drove it to completion
Tell me about a time you simplified a complex process or invented a new solution
Tell me about a time you had to make an urgent decision without complete data
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a decision but committed to it anyway
Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned from it
Tell me about a time you had to leave a task unfinished
Tell me about a time you influenced a change by only asking questions
Tell me about a time you were wrong. How did you realize it, and what did you change?
How do you prioritize when several customers want conflicting things and you cannot satisfy all of them?
Tell me about a time you mentored someone and had to adapt your approach to how they learn
What do you look for when deciding whether someone would raise the bar on your team?
Tell me about a time you were dissatisfied with the quality of something about to ship and what you did about it
Tell me about a time you pushed for a far more ambitious version of a project than the one you were asked for
Tell me about a time you delivered a real result with very little budget, headcount, or time
Tell me about a time you had to give someone news they did not want to hear
How do you go about earning trust with a team you have just joined?
Tell me about a time you kept digging past the obvious explanation and found the real root cause
Tell me about a time your team was ready to give up on a goal and you got it delivered anyway
Tell me about a time you improved things for the people on your team, not just the output
Tell me about an ethical dilemma you faced at work and how you handled it
Tell me about a time you left a system, process, or team in better shape than you found it
Every role
Work-simulation / Situational Judgment
(Online Assessment)
4 questions
Given a workplace scenario involving a conflicting deadline, rank the most and least effective responses
Given a scenario about a dissatisfied customer, choose the response that best reflects Customer Obsession
Workstyle survey: choose which of several statements best reflects how you personally approach ambiguous or resource-constrained problems
Scenario: a teammate proposes a risky shortcut to hit a deadline; evaluate possible responses
Your next step
Interviewing at Amazon?
Make sure your resume gets you to the first round.
Practicing for Amazon against your resume is in Interview Prep on Career.
Common questions
Quick answers.
How many stages are in Amazon's interview process?
Amazon has 8 stages, set out in The process.
What framework does Amazon use to evaluate candidates?
Amazon evaluates candidates against Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles, set out in What Amazon scores.
What kinds of questions does Amazon ask?
Amazon's questions fall into 4 categories, grouped in The questions.
How reliable is this Amazon interview playbook?
It is compiled from public sources, and the evidence is in The research.
Sources (23)
Every public source this page was compiled from. Links open in a new tab.
14 sites, by sources
- igotanoffer.com5
- aboutamazon.com3
- amazon.jobs3
- designgurus.io2
- interviewkickstart.com1
- techprep.app1
- tryexponent.com1
- aboutamazon.eu1
- carrus.io1
- scarletink.com1
- jobtestprep.com1
- glassdoor.com1
- leetcode.com1
- github.com1
- 01aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles
- 02amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-principles
- 03amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/interview-loop
- 04amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/interview-prep/software-develop…
- 05igotanoffer.com/blogs/tech/amazon-interview-process
- 06igotanoffer.com/blogs/tech/amazon-behavioral-interview
- 07igotanoffer.com/en/advice/amazon-leadership-principles
- 08igotanoffer.com/blogs/tech/amazon-bar-raiser-interview
- 09igotanoffer.com/en/advice/amazon-system-design-interview
- 10interviewkickstart.com/blogs/articles/amazon-interview-process-guide
- 11techprep.app/blog/amazon-interview-process
- 12tryexponent.com/blog/how-to-nail-amazons-behavioral-interview-questions
- 13aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/amazon-bar-raiser
- 14aboutamazon.eu/news/working-at-amazon/what-is-a-bar-raiser-at-amazon
- 15carrus.io/blog/all-about-bar-raisers-amazons-essential-element-t…
- 16scarletink.com/a-complete-guide-amazon-bar-raiser
- 17designgurus.io/blog/amazon-14-question
- 18designgurus.io/blog/system-design-interview-amazon
- 19jobtestprep.com/amazon-online-assessment
- 20glassdoor.com/Interview/Amazon-Interview-Questions-E6036.htm
- 21aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/two-new-leadership-principles
- 22leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/5972414/Amazon-SDE-Intern-O…
- 23github.com/kianis4/AmazonPrep
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How similar companies interview
Compare Amazon's process with other Big Tech companies in this playbook: