Get a Job at Amazon: Interview Process and Top Questions

Learn how to prepare for Amazon interviews with this in-depth guide.

We break down the Amazon interview process and the top questions you should expect to answer.

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Verified: This guide was created with insights from Amazon interviewers and candidates who recently went through the loop.

About Amazon

What is Amazon?

Amazon started in 1994 as an online bookstore and grew into the company that now handles a large share of US e-commerce while running the world's biggest cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Its businesses span retail, AWS, advertising, devices like Alexa, and entertainment through Prime Video and Music.

Where is Amazon located?

Amazon's first headquarters is in Seattle, with a second headquarters (HQ2) in Arlington, Virginia, and engineering hubs in Bellevue, New York, Austin, and dozens of cities worldwide. The company employs roughly 1.6 million people globally across corporate offices, fulfillment centers, and physical stores.

Who does Amazon hire?

Amazon hires across software engineering, product, program management, data, design, and solutions architecture, spread over dozens of orgs including AWS, Alexa and Devices, Operations Tech, Retail, Amazon Ads, and Entertainment. What ties the hiring bar together is the company's 16 Leadership Principles. Interviewers assess every candidate against them, and the principles function as the backbone of nearly every hiring decision. Amazon weights demonstrated ownership, customer focus, and analytical judgment over any specific credential or pedigree.

Amazon Interview Resources

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Amazon SDE Interview Guide Amazon Product Manager Interview Guide Amazon Technical Program Manager Interview Guide Amazon Solutions Architect Interview Guide Amazon Data Scientist Interview Guide Amazon Interview Questions Amazon Interview Experiences

Amazon Interview Process

Amazon runs a team-dependent interview process, so the exact rounds shift with your target team, role, and level. Across most roles, the Amazon interview process follows a recognizable shape:

An online assessment for many technical and entry-level roles, combining timed coding on HackerRank with a behavioral section.
A 30-minute recruiter screen covering your background, motivation, and early Leadership Principles fit.
A hiring manager screen that goes deeper on your experience, the team's domain, and conflict resolution.
The loop, a series of four to six interviews covering coding, system design, and behavioral rounds, scheduled across separate days rather than a single onsite block.
A Bar Raiser round led by a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team.

One feature sets Amazon apart from most big tech companies: Leadership Principles aren't confined to a single behavioral round. They run through coding, system design, and screening conversations alike. Amazon publishes its own overview of how it hires.

How long does the interview process take?

Most loops span two to four weeks, though it varies by team. Because Amazon schedules loop rounds separately instead of packing them into one onsite, candidates often have several days between interviews. Recruiters usually give updates after each stage, and the team may add a follow-up round if it needs more signal.

Does Amazon's interview process vary by role?

Yes, more than at most companies. Software engineers get coding and system design rounds, product managers face an all-behavioral loop with no coding, and solutions architects deliver a technical presentation. Interviewers even pick their own questions, and some teams bolt on niche rounds in machine learning, cloud architecture, or low-level object-oriented design. Ask your recruiter what your specific loop includes.

Is there a written assignment or take-home?

For some roles, yes. Product manager loops sometimes include a written assessment, a two to three page behavioral memo due within about 48 hours that reflects Amazon's internal culture of writing memos over slide decks. The behavioral section of the technical online assessment stands in for a take-home, asking you to rate work-style statements rather than write code.

How does Amazon make hiring decisions?

After the loop, every interviewer submits written feedback and a recommendation, then the panel meets for a debrief. The Bar Raiser, who sits outside the hiring team, leads that debrief and can endorse or block an offer based on whether you'd raise the average bar relative to current employees in the role. Each interviewer is typically assigned different Leadership Principles to probe, so the debrief assembles a picture of you across the full set rather than relying on one person's read.

Online Assessment and Recruiter Screen

What is Amazon's online assessment and recruiter screen?

For many technical and early-career roles, the Amazon hiring process opens with a timed online assessment on HackerRank, usually with a multi-week window to complete it. You'll solve two to five algorithm and data structure problems (arrays, trees, recursion, sorting) in about 60 minutes, with difficulty ranging from easy to medium. Some questions use a phase-gated format where you implement one piece of functionality, run a batch of test cases, and unlock the next phase only once the current one passes.

The assessment also carries a behavioral section that looks nothing like a STAR interview. Instead of open-ended scenarios, you rate a series of statements about work style and judgment ("I look forward to the opportunity to learn new things") on a five-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Those statements map to the Leadership Principles and test values alignment rather than storytelling.

The recruiter screen is a separate 30 to 60 minute call focused on your background, motivation, and why Amazon. There's no live coding. Recruiters look for a concise summary of your experience and a few results-backed stories that signal Ownership, Customer Obsession, and Bias for Action.

How should I prepare?

Treat the recruiter call as a two-way conversation and gather intel. Ask which Leadership Principles your target team emphasizes, how many rounds to expect, and whether the loop includes system design or low-level design. For the coding assessment, practice data structures and algorithms until you can talk through your reasoning out loud, since the same habit carries through every later round.

Hiring Manager Screen

What is Amazon's hiring manager screen?

The hiring manager screen runs roughly 30 to 60 minutes, often over Amazon's internal Chime video platform, and goes deeper than the recruiter call. For product roles, the hiring manager digs into your product experience, the technical fluency you'd bring to the team's domain, and a past disagreement with a colleague, frequently mapped to the Invent and Simplify principle. For engineering roles, this stage confirms communication skills and early Leadership Principles signal before the full loop.

Interviewers here look for how quickly you can ramp on the team's product space, how concisely you frame your background, and how you resolved a real conflict with a peer or manager. For solutions architects, the equivalent technical phone screen splits between explaining concepts like APIs, CDNs, and load balancers and answering behavioral questions tied to Customer Obsession, Ownership, and Earn Trust.

Does it vary by role?

It does. Technical roles use this stage to probe domain depth, while product and program roles keep it behavioral. If you have a strong engineering background and are weighing product roles, Amazon runs a separate Technical Product Manager track that evaluates engineering judgment alongside product responsibilities.

The Amazon Loop

What is the Amazon Loop?

The loop is Amazon's version of the onsite: four to six interviews, each about an hour, that test your skills against the role and the Leadership Principles. Unlike the single-day loops common elsewhere, Amazon schedules these rounds separately, sometimes across days or weeks. Each interviewer owns a different set of principles, and their notes get compared in the post-loop debrief.

For software engineers, the loop mixes coding and system design with behavioral questions woven throughout. Coding rounds run 45 to 60 minutes with one or two data structure and algorithm problems, and interviewers expect you to start with a brute-force solution then optimize for time and space while explaining your reasoning aloud. The system design round is where Amazon's bar diverges from other companies: some teams use open-ended prompts like "design a rate limiter," while others use reverse system design, showing you an existing system and asking what happens when specific components break. One Amazon engineering manager described using reverse system design exclusively to test reasoning about failure modes, circuit breakers, and graceful degradation. Resiliency and availability matter more here than raw scalability, so candidates who haven't worked at Amazon's scale can still perform well by reasoning clearly about how systems fail and recover.

What types of rounds are included?

The mix depends on the role, but the broadest cross-role rounds are:

Coding interviews for engineering roles, focused on graphs, trees, arrays, heaps, and traversal patterns, with follow-ups on why you chose an approach.
System design or reverse system design, emphasizing resiliency and clear trade-off reasoning.
Behavioral and Leadership Principles rounds, which appear as dedicated sessions at senior levels and also surface inside technical rounds.
A technical presentation for solutions architects, a 30-minute talk on a problem you've solved, delivered to a mixed technical and non-technical panel that may role-play as customers and push past your original scope.

Some junior engineering loops swap in a low-level object-oriented design round (defining classes and relationships for a scenario like a coupon system) instead of or alongside high-level system design.

How are the behavioral rounds different here?

Amazon's behavioral rounds go deeper than most. Interviewers focus on one or two Leadership Principles per session rather than skimming all of them, and they never tell you which principle they're probing. Follow-ups are extensive: expect to be pressed on the specifics of a decision, your escalation approach, and whether you took ownership or waited for someone else. Behavioral stories double as technical assessments, so if you mention a framework or tool, be ready for "tell me more about that" and "how did you know that was the right call?" One recent candidate described walking through a regression testing project and getting pressed on the exact framework, how often regressions ran, and their precise scope of ownership.

The principles are designed to contrast with each other, which makes some harder to demonstrate. One interviewer flagged Insist on the Highest Standards as tricky because it can conflict with Bias for Action, and noted that Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit is about decisiveness and commitment, not about winning the argument. Prepare stories that show how you handle that tension. Practicing engineering behavioral answers with a partner who interrupts mid-story is closer to the real thing than rehearsing alone.

The Bar Raiser Round

What is the Bar Raiser?

The Bar Raiser is a trained Amazon interviewer pulled from outside the hiring team whose job is to keep the hiring bar high. The role exists to stop teams from lowering their standards out of urgency or familiarity bias, so the Bar Raiser evaluates leadership, judgment, and long-term fit independently of whether the team is eager to fill the seat. They sit outside the hiring decision and lead the post-loop debrief, where they can endorse or block an offer based on whether you'd raise the average bar relative to current Amazon employees in the role.

The round itself is behavioral, typically anchored to two or three Leadership Principles with heavy follow-ups. Questions lean toward self-awareness and failure: a commitment you didn't deliver on, a decision you'd revisit, a time you took responsibility for a team failure. Not every loop includes a Bar Raiser, especially some senior product loops, so confirm with your recruiter.

How should I prepare for it?

Bring stories where you can separate what was in your control from what wasn't, and show what you learned and applied afterward. The Bar Raiser is listening for honesty about gaps, not a polished highlight reel. Reviewing real Amazon interview experiences helps you calibrate how candid strong candidates tend to be.

Amazon Interview Questions

These are examples of real Amazon interview questions reported by interviewers and recent candidates. You can find more in our Amazon interview question bank.

Behavioral and Leadership Principles

Tell me about a time you took ownership of a project. What were your responsibilities, and what actions did you take?
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate. How did you handle it?
Tell me about a time you made a decision with incomplete information.
Tell me about a time you used AI to drive innovation or simplify a process, internally or for customers.
Tell me about a time you weren't able to deliver on a commitment. What caused it, what was the impact, and what would you do differently?
Tell me about a time a customer brought you a problem that wasn't the actual root cause. How did you identify what they really needed?

Coding

Given a string and a pattern with "." and "*" wildcards, return whether the string matches the pattern.
Given a digit string from 2-9, return all possible letter combinations the digits could represent on a phone keypad.
Given a number of courses and an array of prerequisites, return whether you can finish all courses (cycle detection in a directed graph).
Calculate a stock's K-consistency score: the maximum number of contiguous days with the same rounded daily return after removing up to K days.

System Design

Design a rate limiter.
Here's an existing system; walk me through what happens if this component fails, and how you'd recover.
Design a class structure for a coupon or discount system (low-level object-oriented design).
Explain how you'd handle load balancing, data encryption, and failure recovery for a service at scale.

Product Management

Tell me about a time you sacrificed a short-term result for a long-term strategic gain.
Tell me about a time stakeholders weren't aligned on a single proposed solution. What did you do?
Tell me about a time you improved a process tied to Invent and Simplify.
Describe a time you had limited data and had to make an important decision.

Tips for Getting Hired at Amazon

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Build a flexible Leadership Principles story bank. Prepare eight to ten examples that each map to two or three principles depending on how a question is framed, and give every story specific metrics and enough technical depth to survive follow-ups. Amazon interviewers will push on implementation details, so a thin narrative falls apart fast.

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Defend your numbers. For and data roles especially, interviewers ask how you arrived at a metric, target, or threshold. Walk in ready to explain the baseline, the calculation, and why you chose that target over alternatives.

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Escalate face-to-face in your stories. Amazon's culture values direct, in-person escalation with early warning, so describing a problem you raised only over email or that surprised your manager at the deadline reads as a negative signal, particularly at L6 and above.

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Calibrate your scope to the level. Amazon's leveling runs about one notch higher than the rest of the industry, so an L6 here is roughly an L5 elsewhere. L4 impact is individual, L5 reaches your team, L6 spans one or two teams, and L7 is organizational. Frame your stories at the right scope for the level you're targeting.

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Prepare an AI example. Recent loops, especially for product roles, ask how you've used AI in your work, often tied to Invent and Simplify. Have at least one concrete story about how AI changed a discovery process, a prioritization call, or a customer-facing outcome.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Amazon hire new graduates?

Yes. Amazon runs one of the largest early-career and internship programs in tech, hiring new graduates across AWS, Alexa, Prime Video, and other orgs, with internships often converting to full-time offers for strong performers.

Is Amazon's interview process conducted virtually?

Largely, yes. Screens and loop rounds are commonly held over Amazon's internal Chime video platform, and many candidates complete the entire process remotely. Some teams still bring finalists onsite depending on the role and location.

Can I reapply to Amazon if I'm rejected?

Yes. Candidates can reapply, and many do so successfully after gaining more experience or strengthening the areas that came up in feedback. Different teams run their own processes, so a no from one team doesn't close the door across the company.

What Leadership Principles matter most?

Every principle can appear in any round, but Ownership and Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit come up frequently. Interviewers want to see whether you proactively unblock yourself, how you handle conflict, and whether you commit to decisions even when you disagree. The exact emphasis varies by team and interviewer.

Prepare for Your Amazon Interview

Review recently asked Amazon interview questions and answers from real candidates.
Practice with our mock interview tools.
Get role-specific Amazon interview guides.