Updated by Amazon candidates
Software Engineer (L4) Interview Experience
I said I deep dived on an AI project, and they immediately started asking what parameters I used to train the model and why I switched from one LLM to another. Even the behavioral round got super technical.
Interview process
I interviewed for an L4 entry-level SWE role, and the process was one 30 minute phone screen followed by a three-interview super day. The phone screen was quick and a bit rushed, with no real introduction, just one medium array problem and then Q&A. In the loop, the behavioral was only about 10 minutes, but it was done by a technical person who kept going deeper and deeper into whatever project I brought up, so it felt more technical than I expected. The coding round was classic DSA with a graph problem and then a heap problem because we had extra time, and the last round was a low-level OOP design around coupons and vouchers. Overall, I did not think the interview was that difficult, but I realized you really have to be ready to defend the details of your behavioral examples.
- Phone interview
- Final round
Interview tips
Prepare behavioral much more seriously than you think, because the behavioral is done by technical people and they will go deep on your answer. Do LeetCode on graphs, arrays, and strings, and make sure you can explain concepts like BFS vs DFS while coding. Also have some basic low-level system design and object-oriented programming ready, especially classes, inheritance, and abstraction. Mock interviews help a lot because you get used to the environment, and it even helps if you play interviewer once so you understand what they are looking for.
Company culture
What I noticed is that they keep the process pretty structured and efficient: one short phone screen, then a single-day loop. Even the behavioral is not really a relaxed HR-style conversation. The interviewers are technical and they use your own examples to test whether you actually understand the tools, models, stacks, and decisions you mentioned. The coding rounds felt very LeetCode-style, and the low-level design was practical and object-oriented instead of broad architecture trade-offs. My overall feeling was that they care about fundamentals and communication more than trick questions.
Questions asked
Overview
The first loop round was a short behavioral, around 10 minutes, but it was not a soft round at all. The interviewer was technical and kept drilling into the details of whatever example I gave.
Question types asked
Specific questions asked
Why did you choose that approach or tool?
What parameters did you use for training the model?
What tweaks made the model efficient?
I answered with a project where we hit a problem and had to really understand the concept more deeply. I talked about working with AI models, where I first chose one LLM model, then felt it was not good enough and shifted to another one after more research. He went very technical on me and asked why I chose that model, what training parameters I used, and what tweaks I made to make it efficient. It felt like he was checking whether I actually understood the work, not just the story.
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