Amazon Solutions Architect Interview Guide

The Amazon solutions architect interview is a customer-facing, pre-sales loop built around architectural reasoning and clear communication. Its system design round runs as a live conversation, often with no diagram, where the interviewer keeps raising the requirements and pressing for more detail. Leadership Principles run through every round, so each technical answer doubles as a behavioral signal.

This guide breaks down each stage of the Amazon (AWS) solutions architect interview, what interviewers look for, and how to prepare with real example questions, tips, and resources.

Amazon solutions architect interview process

The Amazon (AWS) solutions architect interview replaces algorithm coding with architecture discussion, and layers Leadership Principle questions into nearly every round. Amazon runs a team-dependent process, so the exact rounds and their order vary between teams.

Here's what the interview process can look like:

• Online assessment: A timed technical screen on cloud fundamentals, sometimes skipped based on your background
• Recruiter screen: Logistics, level, and the Leadership Principles your loop will emphasize
• Technical screen: A solutions architect covers cloud reasoning and Leadership Principle questions in one conversation
• Onsite loop: 4-6 virtual interviews spanning system design, technical deep-dives, Leadership Principles, and a project presentation or written work-sample

The full interview process usually takes several weeks to two months. Amazon recruiters are typically transparent about the loop and will share the Leadership Principles to prepare, so ask early.

Online assessment

The Amazon solutions architect online assessment is a timed screen that checks your cloud fundamentals before you reach a live interviewer. Not every candidate takes it; whether it appears for you depends on your background and how you applied.

The assessment tests applied reasoning; expect scenario prompts that map an AWS service to a described customer challenge, plus questions grounded in the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

What the assessment covers:

• Cloud fundamentals: Core compute, storage, networking, and database concepts
• Scenario matching: Choosing the right AWS service for a described customer challenge
• Well-Architected thinking: Reliability, performance, cost, security, and operational trade-offs

Sample questions

Here are real example questions reported for the online assessment:

• Your customer is experiencing heavy load times. Which AWS service would you use to address it?
• Walk through the pillars of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

Recruiter screen

The Amazon solutions architect recruiter screen sets up the rest of the loop. The recruiter confirms your level, walks you through the stages, and often shares prep materials that map the loop and flag which Leadership Principles to focus on.

Use the call to confirm logistics and to ask which format your onsite will take. The presentation and written work-sample split is team-dependent, so knowing early tells you what to prepare.

Technical screen

The Amazon solutions architect technical screen combines cloud reasoning and Leadership Principle questions in a single conversation with a practicing solutions architect. It usually runs 45-60 minutes and moves between technical explanation and behavioral questions.

Expect questions about how core systems work: APIs, CDNs, load balancers, networking, and security. The interviewer may ask you to design a component verbally, without a diagram, and add requirements as you talk.

Interviewers look for:

• Clarity of explanation: How plainly you describe how a system works and why a design choice matters
• Trade-off reasoning: Why you'd choose one service, database, or messaging approach for a given constraint
• Leadership Principle signals: Concrete examples of ownership, customer focus, and sound judgment
• Composure under changing scope: How you adapt when the interviewer adds or shifts requirements

Recently asked questions

Here are real interview questions reported by candidates:

• How does TLS work, and when would you use it?
• What's the difference between TCP and UDP?
• How would you prevent a DDoS attack on AWS?
• How do containers differ from a hypervisor, and when would you use each?
• Tell me about a time you raised the bar.

System design interview

The Amazon solutions architect system design interview is an open-ended, conversational round where you design a cloud architecture and defend your trade-offs in real time. Amazon evaluates how you structure an ambiguous challenge as much as the final design.

Expect the interviewer to keep adding functional and non-functional requirements throughout the round, and to ask follow-up questions about the parts you move past quickly.

Interviewers look for:

• Requirement clarification: How you scope an ambiguous prompt before designing
• Structured reasoning: Whether you break the design into clear, ordered components
• Trade-off justification: Why you'd choose a given database, messaging, or compute approach for the constraints
• Resilience and scale: How you handle high availability, multi-region failure, and growth
• Cost awareness: Whether you factor cost into architecture decisions

Recently asked questions

Here are some real interview questions reported by candidates:

• Design a highly available web application architecture.
• Design an ecommerce platform that stays up through a Black Friday traffic surge.
• Design a system that loses no data if an entire AWS region fails.
• Design a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) Q&A system for millions of documents and hundreds of thousands of users.

Technical knowledge interview

The Amazon solutions architect technical knowledge interview is the onsite deep-dive that follows the initial technical screen, testing your grasp of the foundations of cloud infrastructure in more depth. Interviewers ask you to explain core concepts and reason about how they behave under load, failure, and scale.

Expect questions across networking, storage, databases, security, and disaster recovery. Common areas include load balancing, data encryption, SQL vs. NoSQL trade-offs, multi-AZ and multi-region design, and cost optimization.

Interviewers look for:

• Conceptual depth: How well you understand how core cloud systems work beyond surface familiarity
• Applied judgment: How you match a service or pattern to a real constraint
• Failure thinking: How designs behave under load, outage, and recovery
• Security awareness: How you apply least privilege, encryption, and network controls

Sample questions

Here are real interview questions reported by candidates:

• What are the trade-offs between SQL and NoSQL databases, and when would you choose each?
• When would you use object, block, or file storage on AWS?
• How do you design for high availability across multiple AWS regions?
• Walk through your recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO) for a disaster recovery plan.
• How do you approach cost optimization for a large AWS workload?

Technical presentation

Many Amazon solutions architect loops include a technical presentation, where you present a project to a mixed technical and business panel. Some teams instead assign a written work-sample, such as debugging a CloudFormation stack sent a week or two ahead and writing a short, customer-style proposal, so confirm the format with your recruiter.

When it's a presentation, expect 30-60 minutes in front of solutions architects, an SA manager, and sometimes an account executive. The panel may ask follow-up questions that push past your original scope to see how you handle objections in real time.

Interviewers look for:

• Narrative clarity: Whether you explain the challenge, constraints, decisions, and outcome in a clean arc
• Technical depth: How well your design choices hold up when questioned
• Audience adaptation: How you communicate to both technical and non-technical listeners
• Composure under challenge: How you respond when the panel presses on your decisions

Example prompts

Presentation formats vary by team. Here are example prompts candidates have described:

• Present a project you've delivered, covering the challenge, your architecture decisions, and the outcome.
• Design and present an architecture for a scenario the panel provides, such as a cloud migration.

Leadership Principle interview questions

Leadership Principles run through every round of the Amazon solutions architect loop, from the first screen to the final interview. Amazon evaluates 16 Leadership Principles, and each interviewer usually assesses two or three.

For solutions architects, the Principles tied to customer work and technical judgment come up most. One interviewer is a Bar Raiser, a trained evaluator from outside the hiring team who holds veto power and checks that you'd raise the bar for the role.

The Principles that surface most often for this role include:

• Customer Obsession: Starting from the customer's need and working backward to the architecture
• Ownership: Taking responsibility for outcomes beyond your immediate task
• Dive Deep: Investigating root causes and staying close to technical detail
• Are Right, A Lot: Making sound calls with incomplete information
• Earn Trust: Communicating candidly and admitting what you don't know
• Invent and Simplify: Reducing complex systems to workable designs

Interviewers look for:

• Structured stories: Whether your examples follow a clear situation, action, and result
• Quantified impact: Whether you back decisions with metrics and outcomes
• Scope of impact: Whether you drove the outcome or supported it
• Candor: Whether you represent your experience accurately when challenged

Recently asked questions

Here are real interview questions reported by candidates:

• Tell me about a time you found the root cause of a difficult technical issue.
• Tell me about a time you handled pushback from an internal customer.
• Tell me about a time you had to say no to someone.
• Tell me about a time you made a decision with incomplete data.
• Tell me about a time you disagreed with a stakeholder.

How to prepare for the Amazon solutions architect interview

1. Prepare two or more quantified stories per Leadership Principle: Amazon assesses the Principles in every round, and each interviewer usually owns a few, so spread your examples across "Customer Obsession," "Ownership," "Dive Deep," and "Earn Trust." Structure each story around a clear situation, your specific actions, and a measurable result.
2. Justify every architecture trade-off: Be ready to reason from concrete criteria, like choosing SQL vs. NoSQL by access pattern and consistency needs, or sizing a message queue by throughput and delivery guarantees. Interviewers press hardest on why you picked one database, messaging, or compute service for the constraints in front of you.
3. Practice resilient and migration designs: Work through multi-AZ and multi-region architectures, and be ready to discuss recovery targets (RTO and RPO) and the disaster-recovery spectrum from backup-and-restore to active-active. Prepare at least one legacy-to-cloud migration you can walk through end to end.
4. Apply the Well-Architected Framework as a live lens: Know the six pillars (operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability) and how they trade off when you design under time constraints. Reference them explicitly as you reason through a prompt.
5. Be ready to discuss generative AI: For a RAG design, cover chunking and embeddings, vector store choice, retrieval quality, and guardrails, and know when to prompt, retrieve, or fine-tune. Cost-aware model selection on Amazon Bedrock is increasingly part of the conversation.
6. Narrate your reasoning and state your assumptions: Think through designs aloud, ask clarifying questions before you commit, and call out trade-offs as you make them. Name the limits of your knowledge; overstating familiarity with a service you don't know signals a lack of "Earn Trust."
7. Don't use AI tools during the interview: Amazon's guidelines prohibit generative AI assistance during interviews, and using it can disqualify you. Interviewers watch for candidates reading answers or typing while a question is being asked, so only use AI during your prep time or when the interviewer explicitly permits it.
8. Practice with mock interviews: Run full architecture and Leadership Principle rounds with peer and AI mock interviews to get feedback before the real loop. For targeted help, book a session with an expert coach.

About the Amazon (AWS) solutions architect role

Amazon solutions architects are customer-facing, pre-sales technical experts who help AWS customers design and adopt cloud solutions. The role blends deep technical knowledge with consulting and communication, and it doesn't involve writing production code.

Amazon solutions architects typically work on:

• Designing cloud architectures that match customer requirements and budgets
• Running proofs of concept, demos, and technical workshops
• Advising on migrations, security, and cost optimization
• Guiding customers through AWS services and the Well-Architected Framework

The role spans several levels and org types:

• Levels: SA I through SA III map roughly to L4 through L6, with principal SAs at L7
• Org variants: Commercial SA, Worldwide Public Sector, Professional Services (billable, hands-on delivery), Partner SA, and GenAI or ML specialist SA

How the loop plays out shifts by org: Professional Services leans toward hands-on delivery and is more likely to use a written work-sample, while public sector roles emphasize presentation skills.

Additional resources

• Amazon Solutions Architect Interview Course
• Solutions Architect Behavioral Course
• System Design Interview Course
• Amazon Leadership Principles Course
• Amazon Solutions Architect Interview Questions
• Amazon Behavioral Interview Questions
• Amazon Solutions Architect Interview Experiences
• Interviewing at Amazon

FAQs about the Amazon solutions architect interview

How many rounds is the Amazon solutions architect interview?

The Amazon solutions architect interview usually runs four stages: an online assessment, a recruiter call, a technical screen, and an onsite loop of 4-6 interviews. The onsite covers system design, one or more technical deep-dives, multiple Leadership Principle rounds, and a project presentation or written work-sample. Because Amazon's process is team-dependent, the exact count and order vary, and the full loop usually takes several weeks to two months.

Does the Amazon solutions architect interview include coding?

The Amazon solutions architect interview doesn't include algorithm coding challenges like a software engineering loop. It centers on system design, cloud infrastructure concepts, and Leadership Principles, so you'll explain and defend architectures without writing code in a shared editor. Expect to talk through service trade-offs, high availability, and cost.

How hard is the Amazon solutions architect interview?

The Amazon solutions architect interview is demanding, with candidates rating its difficulty around 3.5 out of 5. Only about 43% report a positive experience, well below Amazon's company average of roughly 58%. Much of the challenge is the breadth, and candidates often describe the loop as longer and more draining than comparable roles at other large tech companies.

Is Amazon still hiring solutions architects?

Amazon continues to hire for cloud and AI roles even after large corporate layoffs in late 2025 and early 2026. The company cut roughly 30,000 corporate positions to flatten its management structure, while pointing to continued investment in AI and AWS. Expect a selective bar and, in some cases, a return to on-site interviews as companies limit AI-assisted assistance during interviews.

Is the Amazon solutions architect role customer-facing?

The Amazon solutions architect role is customer-facing and pre-sales, so the interview tests communication and consulting skills alongside technical depth. You'll design solutions for AWS customers, run proofs of concept and workshops, and explain trade-offs to both technical and business audiences. Interviewers evaluate how clearly you translate architecture decisions for non-technical listeners, which is why the loop often includes a presentation or objection-handling component.

Can you use AI tools during the Amazon interview?

You can't use generative AI tools during Amazon interviews unless the interviewer explicitly permits it, per the company's guidelines, and using them otherwise can disqualify you. Keep AI to your preparation: use it to practice Leadership Principle stories and test your system designs, then deliver those answers unaided in the interview.

How much does an Amazon solutions architect make?

Here are the reported compensation ranges by level for Amazon solutions architects, according to Levels.fyi (as of July 2026):

• SA I (L4): ~$166K
• SA II (L5): ~$237K
• SA III (L6): ~$303K
• Principal SA (L7): ~$435K

Reported ranges run from roughly $169K at entry to $435K or more at the principal level, with a median package around $279K. Pay combines base salary, stock, and a sign-on bonus, and the stock share grows sharply at senior levels.