At Amazon, the interview rewards something candidates routinely underestimate: the 16 Leadership Principles are not a culture-page footnote, they are the scoring rubric. Treat the loop as a pure coding gauntlet and it tends to catch you out, because nearly every round pairs a technical task with behavioural questions, and interviewers write up your answers against specific principles before the debrief.
For most software roles the process runs in three stages: a recruiter screen, an online assessment, then a full interview loop of three to five rounds. The exact shape shifts by level and org. SDE-1 and SDE-2 (L5) loops weight coding and design differently, and teams like AWS, Kuiper, Robotics, or Ads each have their own flavour. New-grad and intern pipelines are often run through a University Talent Acquisition team on a slower timeline.
One thing candidates mention again and again: the timeline is long. It is common to complete an online assessment in one quarter and not sit the loop until the next. Patience, and steady preparation across that gap, is part of the game.
The candidates who come unstuck are rarely the ones who cannot code. One who felt their coding rounds went fine still bombed the behavioural stories and got turned down, which is what you would expect if the principles are being scored, not admired.
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See how it worksThe interview process, round by round
- Recruiter screen Call
A recruiter confirms your background, target level and location, and walks you through the pipeline. Light on technical depth, but this is where level (SDE-1 vs SDE-2) is set, and level determines how hard the loop will be.
- Online Assessment (OA) ~2 to 2.5 hrs, HackerRank
Candidates consistently describe three parts: a timed coding section of two problems (around 90 minutes), a Work Simulation where you make day-to-day SDE decisions in a scenario, and a Work Style Survey of behavioural questions tied to the Leadership Principles. Some report short system-design or debugging MCQs as well.
- Phone screen (role-dependent) About an hour
Not every pipeline includes one, but many do, especially for experienced and front-end roles. Expect one or two behavioural questions plus a coding problem, sometimes typed into a plain shared editor rather than a full IDE.
- The Loop, Round 1: Coding + LPs 60 min
Opens with one or two Leadership Principles questions and their follow-ups, then a data-structures problem. Reported examples include graph problems in the style of Course Schedule II and tree or subtask-status problems. Readable code and clear communication are scored, not just a passing solution.
- The Loop, Round 2: Design + LPs 60 min
Low-level or object-oriented design for SDE-1 and SDE-2 (a reported example: design an ATM), moving toward higher-level system design at senior levels. Again fronted by behavioural questions.
- The Loop, Round 3+ and the Bar Raiser 60 min each
Additional rounds mix coding, design and deeper behavioural probing. One round is run by a Bar Raiser, and candidates report that round leaning almost entirely on the Leadership Principles, sometimes a full hour of behavioural questions and follow-ups.
Interview questions candidates report
Online Assessment
- Two timed coding problems (arrays, strings, hash maps, graphs); the goal is to pass every test case
- Work Simulation: choose how an SDE should respond to realistic on-the-job scenarios
- Work Style Survey: questions about how you approach engineering work, tied to the Leadership Principles
- Occasional multiple-choice questions on time complexity and basic system design
Coding and data structures
- Course Schedule II style topological-sort / dependency problems
- Resolve the status of tasks across a subtask tree (tree traversal / propagation)
- Classic Amazon-tagged patterns: sliding window, and graph or tree traversals with BFS and DFS
- Explain your approach and complexity out loud before you code
- Refactor toward readable names and clean structure, interviewers flag unreadable code
Low-level and system design
- Design an ATM (state, transactions, edge cases) for SDE-1/SDE-2
- Design a parking lot (classes, state and edge cases) for object-oriented design rounds
- For senior loops: design a scalable service, discuss storage, caching and trade-offs
Leadership Principles to prepare a story for
- Customer Obsession: a time you put the customer's need ahead of the easy path
- Ownership: something you drove that sat outside your formal remit
- Dive Deep: a problem you dug into further than anyone else on the team
- Bias for Action: a decision you made quickly on incomplete information
- Earn Trust: a failure you owned and what you changed afterwards
- Learn and Be Curious: a skill you picked up fast when the work demanded it
- Deliver Results: an outcome you can attach a real number to
Front-end engineer variant
- Build a small app in the OA: a form capturing name, phone and address with validation
- Implement infinite scroll, a star-rating widget, or a customisable navbar
- Fetch and render results from an API (for example a Giphy image search) responsively
- JavaScript exercises drawn from the phone-screen pool: debounce and throttle, promise.all, an event emitter, event bubbling, and higher-order functions like map and reduce
What candidates said about the process
An SDE-2 candidate described a two-and-a-half-hour online assessment split three ways: a ninety-minute section with two coding problems, a work-simulation exercise about the decisions an SDE faces day to day, and a work-style survey asking how they approach engineering work.
Read the candidate's account →Another SDE-2 candidate walked through a loop where every round paired Leadership Principles with a technical task: a course-schedule-style graph problem in one round, and low-level design (designing an ATM) in another. The feedback they got on the coding round was that they had been slow and that the code could be more readable.
Read the candidate's account →One report on the SDE-2 loop described the first round opening with two Leadership Principles questions and their follow-ups before moving to a coding problem that asked them to determine the status of each task in a system where tasks form a tree of subtasks.
Read the candidate's account →An experienced front-end engineer described an unusually lean pipeline: an online assessment that was a small app build (a form capturing name, phone and address), then straight to a five-interviewer final round, with a rejection two days later. They credited strong, recent behavioural stories as the part they felt most prepared on.
Read the candidate's account →A front-end phone screen was reported as relaxed but pointed: two behavioural questions and one coding task typed into a plain notepad, drawn from a pool of UI exercises such as building an infinite scroll, a star-rating component, or a Giphy image search.
Read the candidate's account →How to prepare
- Prepare Leadership Principle stories the way you prepare algorithms. One candidate built a bank of about a dozen STAR examples (Situation, Task, Action, Result) and reckoned 5 to 6 well-polished ones that stretch across different prompts beat covering all sixteen principles lightly; another worked from roughly two stories per principle. Aim for the same, so any behavioural question has a ready answer.
- Say the metric. Amazon interviewers reward Deliver Results, so quantify outcomes: latency cut, cost saved, users affected. Vague impact reads as weak.
- Talk before you type. Two candidates were marked down not for a wrong answer but for hard-to-read code, one flagged for confusing variable names, the other told the code could be cleaner. Narrate your approach and name your variables like a colleague will have to read them.
- Do not neglect low-level design. Object-oriented design (an ATM, a parking lot) shows up in SDE-1 and SDE-2 loops more than people expect. Practise structuring classes, state and edge cases out loud.
- Plan for a long timeline. An OA in one quarter and the loop in the next is normal. Keep problems warm rather than cramming right before an unpredictable loop date.
- For the OA, aim to pass every test case, but a partial score is not an automatic reject: one candidate cleared only 8 of 15 on the second problem and still advanced to the loop. Answer the behavioural survey in line with the Leadership Principles, not with what you think sounds impressive.
Frequently asked questions
How many rounds is the Amazon interview?
After a recruiter screen and the online assessment, most software loops are three to five rounds of about an hour each. Each round typically combines a technical task with Leadership Principles questions, and one interviewer is a Bar Raiser.
What is the Amazon Online Assessment?
Candidates describe a two to two-and-a-half hour assessment with three parts: two timed coding problems (around 90 minutes), a work-simulation exercise, and a work-style survey based on the Leadership Principles. It is usually delivered through HackerRank.
How important are the Leadership Principles?
Central. Amazon interviewers score your behavioural answers against specific Leadership Principles in almost every round, and weak behavioural answers sink strong coders. Prepare real STAR stories mapped to the principles.
What is a Bar Raiser?
In these candidate reports, Bar Raiser is the name given to one round of the loop. What they consistently describe is a round that leans almost entirely on the Leadership Principles, in some cases close to a full hour of behavioural questions and follow-ups.
What coding questions does Amazon ask?
Candidates report data-structure problems such as topological sort in the style of Course Schedule II, tree and subtask-status problems, graph traversals with BFS and DFS, and sliding-window questions. Readable, well-communicated code matters as much as a correct answer.
How long does the Amazon interview process take?
It varies widely and is often slow. Candidates commonly report completing the online assessment months before the loop is scheduled, so plan for a process that can stretch across quarters.
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