Amazon Software Development Engineer (SDE) Interview
A coding-plus-behavioural loop built on the 16 Leadership Principles, with an outside Bar Raiser.
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The Amazon interview, in brief
Amazon's SDE hiring is one of the most structured and behaviourally-weighted processes in big tech. A technical loop is split roughly evenly between coding/design and behavioural questions tied to Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles, and every loop includes a specially-trained Bar Raiser from outside the hiring team who safeguards the long-term hiring bar. It is famously team-dependent — round count and emphasis vary by team and level.
A recruiter screen is followed by an online assessment (coding problems plus a work-simulation and a work-style survey), then a phone/technical screen, then the loop: four to five interviews mixing coding, design (mainly at SDE II+), and Leadership-Principle behavioural questions embedded in every round. The Bar Raiser must concur in the debrief for an offer to proceed.
Interview rounds
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1. Recruiter screen 15–30 min · non-technical
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2. Online assessment (OA) ~2–3.5 hrs · proctored
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3. Phone / technical screen 45–60 min
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4. On-site loop 4–5 rounds · ~45–60 min each
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5. Bar Raiser round Interviewer from outside the team
Coding & DSA topics
System design
For SDE I (new grad) there is usually no distributed-systems round; a "design" question tends to be low-level / object-oriented design. For SDE II (experienced), expect a dedicated system-design round scoped to a scalable service — APIs, storage, scaling, and trade-offs.
Behavioural round
Behavioural signal is weighted as heavily as coding and is anchored on Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles — Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Are Right A Lot, Learn and Be Curious, Hire and Develop the Best, Insist on the Highest Standards, Think Big, Bias for Action, Frugality, Earn Trust, Dive Deep, Have Backbone (Disagree and Commit), Deliver Results, Strive to be Earth's Best Employer, and Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility. STAR answers with specific, measurable results are explicitly expected.
Representative question categories
Patterns in Amazon’s style — not verbatim proprietary questions.
- Graphs (BFS/DFS) — Number-of-islands / connected components, shortest path on a grid.
- Heaps / top-K — K closest points, top-K frequent elements, merge K sorted lists.
- Dynamic programming — Subsequence, partition, or path-counting problems.
- Object-oriented design (SDE I) — Model the classes for a parking lot, elevator, or deck of cards.
- System design (SDE II) — Design a URL shortener or notification service within a service boundary.
- Leadership Principles — "A time you disagreed with your manager" (Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit); "a time you dug into a root cause" (Dive Deep).
How to prepare
Do
- Prepare a bank of STAR stories mapped to specific Leadership Principles — each interviewer typically owns two or three.
- Quantify outcomes: Amazon behavioural answers land when the result has a number.
- For coding, write real, syntactically correct code that handles edge cases; the OA monitors copy-paste.
- Expect the Bar Raiser to dive deep — be ready to explain the data behind a decision and your own specific action.
Avoid
- Telling "we" stories with no identifiable personal contribution.
- Reciting Leadership Principles instead of demonstrating them with a real situation.
- Forgetting the "Result" in STAR, or padding a story past two to three minutes.
Who can apply
SDE I is entry-level (~0–2 years) with a Bachelor's/Master's in CS or a related field; SDE II typically needs 2+ years plus systems-design experience. There is no officially published CGPA cutoff.
Amazon interview FAQ
- How many Leadership Principles does Amazon have?
- Sixteen. They are woven into every interview round, not just one behavioural round, and each interviewer typically probes two or three of them.
- What is an Amazon Bar Raiser?
- A specially-trained interviewer from outside the hiring team who safeguards Amazon's long-term hiring bar and Leadership Principles. The Bar Raiser holds strong, effectively veto-level, influence in the hiring decision.
- Does Amazon ask system design for new grads?
- Usually not distributed system design. SDE I candidates more often get a low-level / object-oriented design question. A dedicated scalable system-design round appears at SDE II and above.
- Should I use the STAR method at Amazon?
- Yes — Amazon explicitly recommends STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) for behavioural answers, with specific metrics and your own actions rather than the team's.
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Wrexa Edge is an independent exam-prep platform and is not affiliated with, authorised by, or endorsed by Amazon. This guide is based on publicly documented interview practice; it does not reproduce any employer’s internal rubric or question bank, and it does not predict a hiring outcome.