The short answer: Amazon's software development engineer (SDE) interview runs from an online assessment to a loop of 55-minute interviews: four for SDE II and five for SDE III, according to Amazon. Every interviewer asks Leadership Principle questions, and a Bar Raiser from outside the team helps make the decision. Amazon says you hear back within five business days of the loop. Last reviewed October 2026.
Amazon Software Engineer at a Glance
Base Salary (US postings)
$111k - $271k/yr
Interview Rounds
4 to 5 rounds
Levels
L4 - L7
Experience
1–10+ yrs
Amazon software engineer interview: quick answers
| Question | Short answer |
|---|---|
| How many interview rounds? | An online assessment, sometimes a phone screen, then a loop of four 55-minute interviews for SDE II or five for SDE III. |
| What is in the online assessment? | For SDE II: two coding questions in 90 minutes, system design scenarios and a work style survey, with seven days to finish. New grads get coding, a Workstyles Assessment and a Work Simulation. |
| What is a Bar Raiser? | An interviewer from outside the hiring team who acts as an objective third party and, with the hiring manager, makes the hiring decision. Amazon says it has more than 3,600 of them. |
| How are the Leadership Principles tested? | Each interviewer typically asks two or three behavioral questions tied to Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles. |
| How long does it take? | Amazon gives loop results within five business days. Candidate guides put the whole process at four to eight weeks. |
The Amazon software engineer role
What Amazon engineers work on, the skills its job postings ask for, and what a normal week looks like.
Primary Focus
What You Need
- Owning code from design through deployment and operations, including on-call
- Code reviews and technical documentation
- Building distributed services and APIs
- Writing design documents and taking part in design reviews
Nice to Have
- AWS services such as Lambda, DynamoDB, SQS and S3
- Infrastructure as code with CDK or Terraform
- Using GenAI tools to work faster
Languages
Tools & Technologies
Want to ace the interview?
Practice with real questions.
A Week in the Life of a Amazon Software Engineer
Illustrative mid-level week · Amazon
An illustrative week for a mid-level engineer, built from practices Amazon describes in its own publications and job postings. Real weeks vary a lot by team.
Culture notes
- Amazon says it uses its 16 Leadership Principles every day when discussing ideas and choosing how to solve problems.
- Amazon expects corporate employees in the office five days a week since January 2, 2025.
Key takeaway: Writing is how decisions get made, and teams run what they build.
Amazon software engineer levels and pay
Your level sets the bar you are interviewed against and the pay band of the offer.
Amazon Software Engineer Levels
Each level has different expectations, compensation, and interview focus.
What This Level Looks Like
Entry level. Builds features within a team, mentored by more senior engineers.
Interview Focus at This Level
New grads take an online assessment with coding, a Workstyles assessment and a Work Simulation.
Find your level
Practice with questions tailored to your target level.
Level names and experience come from Amazon's postings where they state them, and otherwise from compensation data and candidate reports.
Pay in Amazon's US job postings
Amazon's US postings list a base pay range by level and location. Experienced-hire postings add that the package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units. New grad postings list one starting figure per city instead of a range.
| Posting | Location | US base salary range |
|---|---|---|
| SDE I (experienced hire) | Seattle, WA | $110K to $160K |
| SDE I (new grad, one starting figure) | Seattle, WA or Austin, TX | $129K |
| SDE II | Most US locations | $144K to $194K |
| SDE II | California | $165K to $224K |
| SDE III / Senior SDE | Most US locations | $168K to $227K |
| SDE III / Senior SDE | New York, NY | $185K to $250K |
| Principal SDE | Seattle, WA | $200K to $271K |
Bands are higher in New York and California, as the extra rows show. Amazon uses SDE III and Senior SDE for the same band. Ranges seen October 27, 2026.
Amazon software engineer interview process
Amazon publishes level-specific prep pages for SDE II and SDE III, so most of the details below are official. There is no SDE I prep page, so the new grad loop size is not officially stated.
4 to 5 rounds·~3 to 6 weeks end to end
Initial Screen
1 roundOnline assessment
New grads: coding (about 70 minutes), a Workstyles Assessment and a Work Simulation of realistic Amazon situations. SDE II: two coding questions in 90 minutes, system design scenarios and a work style survey.
Tips for this round
- In the work simulation and work style sections, answer the way an Amazon engineer would act on the Leadership Principles, with customers first.
- Write complete, running code in the coding section and test the edge cases the prompt hints at.
Phone Screen
1 roundPhone screen (some candidates)
SDE III: 60 minutes with a senior leader, half Leadership Principles and half coding and design. Candidate guides say others get it mainly when they skip the assessment.
Tips for this round
- Expect half the time on Leadership Principles, so have stories ready before you start coding practice.
- Senior candidates should be ready to discuss design choices from their own past systems.
Onsite
1 roundInterview loop
Four interviews for SDE II, five for SDE III. Syntactically correct code with no pseudocode, at least one system design question at SDE II and above, object-oriented design in junior loops, and Leadership Principle questions in every interview. One interviewer is a Bar Raiser.
Tips for this round
- Every interviewer asks Leadership Principle questions, so you need more stories than rounds. Aim for two per principle you expect to be asked about.
- Use data in your stories: what you measured before and after, and what it meant for customers.
Decision
1 roundDecision
The Bar Raiser and hiring manager lead the debrief. You hear the result within five business days.
Tips for this round
- The Bar Raiser makes the final decision together with the hiring manager, so no single round is a throwaway.
- Amazon says you hear back within five business days. Follow up with your recruiter after that.
Tips to Stand Out
- Write syntactically correct code, not pseudocode, and practice coding without an IDE.
- Cover edge cases and invalid input. Amazon judges code on being scalable, robust and well tested.
- Ask questions to complete and check your system design.
- Use STAR with metrics for Leadership Principle questions, and say "I" rather than "we".
- Keep each story to about four minutes and use different examples for different questions.
Common Reasons Candidates Don't Pass
- ✗Rambling stories instead of short STAR answers tied to Leadership Principles.
- ✗Vague answers without specific numbers.
- ✗Saying "we" so often that interviewers cannot tell what you did.
- ✗Not asking clarifying questions or stating assumptions before solving.
- ✗Not knowing which team or role you are interviewing for.
Based on Amazon's hiring pages and candidate reports.
Amazon commits only to the five-day decision window. Candidate guides put the whole process at four to eight weeks, and some 2025 new grads report three to four months from assessment to decision. Last reviewed October 2026.
What is different at Amazon
- The Bar Raiser. Every loop includes an Amazon employee from outside the hiring team who acts as an objective third party and makes the final decision together with the hiring manager. Amazon says it has more than 3,600 Bar Raisers.
- Leadership Principles in every interview. Each interviewer typically asks two or three questions tied to Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles, and the online assessment includes a work style section built on them.
- Real code only. Amazon tells SDE candidates to write syntactically correct code with no pseudocode, and says it does not ask brain teasers.
- A Work Simulation for new grads. The new grad online assessment puts you in realistic Amazon work situations, on top of the coding section.
- Level-specific prep. SDE II gets an online assessment and four 55-minute interviews; SDE III gets a 60-minute phone screen with a senior leader and five 55-minute interviews.
Amazon software engineer interview questions
Coding problems from our bank, then design and behavioral practice prompts we wrote for this guide.
Coding problems tagged Amazon
From the DataInterview coding bank, where our team tags each problem with the companies it fits. Open one to solve it in the code editor.
Median of Two Sorted Arrays
Maximum Frequency Stack
Minimum Height Trees
Task Scheduler
K Closest Points to Origin
Word Ladder
Sliding Window Maximum
Valid Sudoku
Repeated DNA Sequences
Kth Largest Element in a Stream
System design practice
Practice prompts we wrote around Amazon's products. They are not reported interview questions. Each answer is an outline of what a strong answer covers.
Design the order history page for a large e-commerce site.
Sample Answer
Orders are written once and read often, so store them in a database partitioned by customer and keep a read-optimized view. Cover pagination, search by date or item, and how status updates from shipping systems flow in through events.
Design a system that tracks inventory across warehouses.
Design a notification service that sends email, SMS and push messages.
Design a shopping cart that survives across devices.
Design a product review system.
Fundamentals practice
Concept questions on the topics Amazon's rounds lean on, with short model answers. We wrote these for practice.
Design the classes for a parking lot.
Sample Answer
Start with requirements: vehicle sizes, levels, payment and how to find a free spot. Core classes are ParkingLot, Level, Spot (with a size), Vehicle subtypes and Ticket. Keep spot allocation behind an interface so the strategy can change, and keep free spots per size in a structure that finds one in O(1). Talk through what changes when a new vehicle type is added.
What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface?
How do you make a service call safe to retry?
How does a load balancer decide where to send traffic?
Behavioral practice
Practice prompts we wrote for the behavioral rounds. They are not reported interview questions.
Tell me about a time you made a decision with incomplete data.
Sample Answer
Maps to Bias for Action and Are Right, A Lot. Say what you knew, what you did not, the decision and the result.
Describe a time you disagreed with your manager and what happened.
Tell me about a time you went deep to find the root cause of a problem.
Tell me about a time you simplified something complex.
Describe a time you delivered under a tight deadline.
Practice problem: cheapest delivery route with at most k stops
pythonWarehouses are numbered 0 to n - 1. Each route (a, b, cost) ships a package from a to b. Return the cheapest cost to get a package from src to dst using at most k intermediate stops, or -1 if no such route exists. Example: n = 4, routes [(0, 1, 100), (1, 2, 100), (2, 3, 100), (0, 3, 500)], src 0, dst 3, k = 1 returns 500, because the 300 route needs two stops.
1from typing import List, Tuple
2
3def cheapest_route(n: int, routes: List[Tuple[int, int, int]], src: int, dst: int, k: int) -> int:
4 """Return the cheapest cost from src to dst with at most k stops, or -1."""
5 pass700+ coding problems with a live code executor.
Practice in the EngineHow to prepare
A plan for the Amazon loop, most important first:
- Write stories for the Leadership Principles first. They come up in every interview.
- Practice writing complete, syntactically correct code. Amazon does not accept pseudocode.
- For SDE II and above, practice system design. For new grads, practice object-oriented design.
- Take a timed practice assessment before the real one.
Practice path
Courses that cover the rounds above:
Are you ready for the Amazon software engineer interview?
1 / 7Can you solve a medium problem (graphs, intervals, heaps or sliding window) in about 25 minutes while explaining your approach?
Frequently Asked Questions
How many interviews are in the Amazon SDE loop?
Amazon says four 55-minute interviews for SDE II and five for SDE III. Amazon does not publish a loop size for SDE I; candidate reports describe about three rounds for new grads.
What is the Amazon Bar Raiser interview?
One interviewer in every loop is a Bar Raiser, an Amazon employee from outside the hiring team who acts as an objective third party. With the hiring manager, the Bar Raiser makes the hiring decision.
Can I write pseudocode in the Amazon interview?
No. Amazon tells SDE candidates to write syntactically correct code, with no pseudocode.
What is in the Amazon SDE II online assessment?
Amazon describes two coding questions in 90 minutes, then system design scenarios and a work style survey. You get seven days to complete it.
How long does Amazon take to give interview results?
Amazon says you hear back within five business days of the loop.
How much do Amazon software engineers make?
Amazon's US postings list base ranges of about $144K to $194K for SDE II, $168K to $227K for SDE III or Senior SDE and $200K to $271K for Principal in most locations, with higher bands in New York and California. Experienced hires also get sign-on payments and restricted stock units.
Do Amazon software engineers work in the office?
Yes. Amazon has expected corporate employees in the office five days a week since January 2, 2025, except for approved exceptions.
