Amazon Software Engineer Interview Handbook
Learn what it’s like to interview at Amazon in 2024 as a software engineer.
In this comprehensive handbook, you will discover exactly what to expect during the Amazon interview process. You will also find details on how to answer some of the most commonly asked Amazon questions.
Let’s take your interview to the next level!
Amazon Salary Structure in the US
Here are Amazon’s average salaries for software engineers in the US:
- SDE I (L4): 170K
- SDE II (L5): 239K
- SDE III (L6): 345K
Amazon Interview Process
Here is what to expect in an Amazon interview for a software engineer:
➡ Recruiter Phone Screen — Initial screening based on resume, background, and team fit.
➡ 1–2 Online Assessments — Algorithm and coding questions.
➡ Technical phone interview — You will be interviewed either in person or via telephone with the hiring manager, who will be your direct manager. You will be asked one or two coding questions related to data structures and algorithms. Some questions from your resume.
➡ Onsite Loop (5–6 interviews) — Algorithm, System Design or Object Oriented Design, Behavioral questions.
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Algorithms — Coding questions solved on a whiteboard.
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Design — Junior engineers will be asked Object Oriented Design questions, whereas senior engineers will be asked System Design questions.
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Behavioral questions related to Amazon’s leadership principles.
➡ Bar Raiser Interview — A Bar Raiser is a skilled interviewer who acts as a neutral third party in the hiring process. Expect coding, design, and behavioral questions related to Amazon’s leadership principles.
Interview tips
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Data Structures — Practice common data structures like Arrays, Strings, HashTables, Trees, LinkedLists, Stacks, and Queues. Develop an understanding of the inner workings of these data structures. You will be expected to know the runtimes for common operations and how they use memory.
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Algorithm — Practice divide and conquer, breadth-first search vs. depth-first search, and traversal algorithms.
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Coding — Candidates are expected to write syntactically correct code.
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Amazon’s Leadership Principles — Must do Amazon's leadership principles
Top recent Amazon-tagged coding questions on LeetCode
1. Biggest Island (easy) — LC (695) (link)
Statement: Given a 2D array (i.e., a matrix) containing only 1s (land) and 0s (water), find the biggest island in it. Write a function to return the area of the biggest island.
An island is a connected set of 1s (land) and is surrounded by either an edge or 0s (water). Each cell is considered connected to other cells horizontally or vertically (not diagonally).
2. ‘K’ Closest Points to the Origin (easy) — LC (973) (link)
Statement: Given an array of points in a 2D plane, find ‘K’ closest points to the origin.
3. Right View of a Binary Tree (easy) — LC (199) (link)
Statement: Given a binary tree, return an array containing nodes in its right view. The right view of a binary tree is the set of nodes visible when the tree is seen from the right side.
4. Number of Islands (easy) — LC (200) (link)
Statement: Given a 2D array (i.e., a matrix) containing only 1s (land) and 0s (water), count the number of islands in it.
An island is a connected set of 1s (land) and is surrounded by either an edge or 0s (water). Each cell is considered connected to other cells horizontally or vertically (not diagonally).
5. Merge ‘K’ Sorted Lists (medium) — LC (23) (link)
Statement: Given an array of ‘K’ sorted LinkedLists, merge them into one sorted list.
6. Tasks Scheduling (medium) — LC (207) (link)
Statement: There are ’N’ tasks, labeled from ‘0’ to ‘N-1’. Each task can have some prerequisite tasks which need to be completed before it can be scheduled. Given the number of tasks and a list of prerequisite pairs, find out if it is possible to schedule all the tasks.
7. Merge Intervals (medium) — LC (56) (link)
Statement: Given a list of intervals, merge all the overlapping intervals to produce a list that has only mutually exclusive intervals.
8. Zigzag Traversal (medium) — LC (103) (link)
Statement: Given a binary tree, populate an array to represent its zigzag level order traversal. You should populate the values of all nodes of the first level from left to right, then right to left for the next level, and keep alternating in the same manner for the following levels.
9. Minimum Meeting Rooms (hard) — LC (252) (link)
Statement: Given a list of intervals representing the start and end time of ’N’ meetings, find the minimum number of rooms required to hold all the meetings.
10. Alien Dictionary (hard) — LC (269) (link)
Statement: There is a dictionary containing words from an alien language for which we don’t know the ordering of the letters. Write a method to find the correct order of the letters in the alien language. It is given that the input is a valid dictionary and there exists an ordering among its letters.
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