Amazon Software Engineer Interview Questions

Anonymous Aardvark - "Recently, I had to make a decision that I could automate a part of a process now and help the operations team reducing 9 hours of manual work to 60 minutes for one client. The second option was to fully automate the end to end process that would take 4 weeks of development, but fully automate the process and that could be rolled out across the board. The process was to change the member's paperless preference to paper when a sent email gets bounced 3 times in a row and inform her with a paper"See full answer

Sreenisha S. - "Let me tell you about a time where a website I managed suddenly showed slow performance and the mistake on our side was it was unnoticed until a user reported the issue to management. As a PM for that project, I took full responsibility of the situation and worked with the engineering team to quickly resolve it. This mistake taught me the importance of focusing and monitoring non functional requirements as well in addition to new feature development /adoption where I was mostly spending my time"See full answer

Anonymous Mongoose - "The below system design addresses the requirements for a scalable distributed onboarding service, focusing on robust data validation, asynchronous processing, real-time aggregation, and efficient querying of metadata. Core Principles: Asynchronous Processing: Decouple components to ensure high throughput and responsiveness. Scalability & Elasticity: Utilize technologies that can scale horizontally to handle varying loads. Data Durability & Integrity: Ensure no data l"See full answer

Ross B. - "I most want to communicate a few principals of conflict resolution that I believe were integral in this situation, which are mutual respect, a results orientation, an unwavering focus on the user. To that end, here’s how I’d like to structure this answer: First, I’ll tell you about the project we were working on, to provide some background for you. Second, I’ll describe the disagreement. Third, I’ll describe how we arrived at a solution, and finally, I’ll discuss how those 3 conflict resolut"See full answer

Aabid S. - "We had a huge launch on September 1st of this year where we completely redesigned our application from the grounds up and also migrated to a new platform (React.JS). This project took us 8 months and the launch was a huge deal for the team. Unfortunately the launch wasn't as smooth as we expected and despite doing multiple rounds of QA, some major issues cropped up in the core part of the app right after launch and our client was quite upset since it was disrupting their day-to-day workflow. "See full answer

Ushita S. - "A clarifying question: Is this question asking about when I met a tight deadline in a project or how did I manage a project that had a tight deadline? The answer uploaded to this question is good, I would also add 'creating a critical path from overall project schedule and then making sure that none of the deliverables in the critical path are sacrificed in order to meet the tight deadline' as an action taken."See full answer

Vince S. - "1. Requirements Analysis Functional Requirements Video streaming with multiple quality levels Content browsing and search Continue watching functionality Content recommendations Non-Functional Requirements Low latency video delivery (<2s startup time) High availability (99.99% uptime) Scalability to handle millions of concurrent streams API response time < 100ms 2. Microservices Architecture Core Microservices Content Service Content metadata mana"See full answer

Umang S. - "Just a bit of context on what could be a risk in Product or Software Development. We talk about the Scope, Quality, and Time Triangle. IMHO the only variables that can matter and can pose risk are these. Try to form an answer where you used the Effort, Value, Risk framework to quantify the risk. The answer can be similar to short term sacrifices for long term gains, as you do take in mind the risk the short term sacrifices pose. Situation - I was leading the team to complete an overhaul of the"See full answer

WaterBuffalo - "One of the most challenging situations was joining a new startup to realize that they did not figure out their core product and that customers were dissatisfied and leaving in droves. I worked together with the leaders to understand the core issue and the reasons that the customers were leaving. Then together with the team, we set out to map out those core issues and the gaps that we had in our product. We then worked towards designing a new solution to address those gaps and build an MVP. W"See full answer

Aabid S. - "I work at a startup that makes software for Law Enforcement and the FBI. Our product analyzes calls being made by prison inmates and "listens" for predictors of violence and criminal behavior. Our clients are some of the top state prisons in the country. Recently one of the largest states in the country decided to evaluate our product for their prison system. I demo'd the product to the officers and they seemed to like everything. During the presentation they asked us if the product was ADA com"See full answer

Vijay M. - "Very well done."See full answer

Bipin R. - "As you know, this is the most important question for any interview. Here is a structure I like to follow, Start with 'I'm currently a SDE/PM/TPM etc with XYZ company.... ' Mention how you got into PM/TPM/SDE field (explaining your journey) Mention 1 or 2 accomplishments Mention what you do outside work (blogging, volunteer etc) Share why are you looking for a new role Ask the interviewer if they have any questions or will like to dive deep into any of your experience"See full answer

Ayinde B. - "I was working for my friend building streams at venues across the Chicago land area for FGC (fighting game tournaments), I adjusted and engineered his equipment to be set up permanently that's until covid came around at least. I used OBS to give visual appearances to stream watchers. So we're talking about subscribe, follow, and donation notifications and things of that nature for viewers to know they contributed in one of those ways. I set up proper sign-up scheduling for participants to lock t"See full answer

B. T. - "The interviewer was interested how the system design would be for files, directories, symbolic links. After proposing my idea, I was asked to print all files for a given path."See full answer

Pavani B. - "Request inputs/feedback on my response below with regards to this question and ways to improve and if it looks apt for this question. As a TPM at xxx, I was responsible for delivering a feature that would provide prescription (medications) alternatives to users in the Prescription Shopping Consumer Experience App. The project had a tight deadline as it was something that our account management team promised to a client who wanted it for their employees. My goal was to ensure smooth development"See full answer

Scott S. - " To clarify on what we are trying to solve for and get the definition of a distributed scheduler straight . So A Distributed Scheduler refers to a system that can handle job scheduling and execution in a scalable and fault-tolerant manner by distributing the workload across multiple servers or nodes. we will make some assumptions with the design , as follows: we will assume 10,000 QPS for job submissions and should be able query for jobs status . Job execution should have minimal latency"See full answer

Dean Z. - "I will use below 4 pillars to rate and prioritize those 5 projects: Analyze the impact of those 5 projects, to our team and to the whole company maybe Find out if those 5 projects have any dependency between each other Clarify the timeline of each project Identity the status of resources to work on those 5 projects and also the status of their dependencies"See full answer

Anni P. - "I firstly discuss the brute force approach in O(n^2) time complexity , than i moved to O(nlogn) tine complexity than i discussed the O(n) time complexity and O(n) space complexity . But interviewer want more optimised solution , in O(n) time complexity without using extra space , The solution wants O(1) space complexity i have to do changes in same array without using any space . This method is something like i have to place positive values to its original position by swapping and rest negativ"See full answer

Anonymous Goat - "Batch Packing Problem In Amazon’s massive warehouse inventory, there are different types of products. You are given an array products of size n, where products[i] represents the number of items of product type i. These products need to be packed into batches for shipping. The batch packing must adhere to the following conditions: No two items in the same batch can be of the same product type. The number of items packed in the current batch must be strictly greater than the number pack"See full answer

Rjj - "I tried solving this problem and here is the recorded video for the answer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1tOkeQjyI4 And here is the link to Excalidraw board - https://excalidraw.com/#json=uabNFHcZm5qNh8CInMvyh,Wn9Vf1ZhGdl_iBCQYFkYdw"See full answer