Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.2 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 67% positive. To compare, the company-average is 57.8% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 47 days to get hired, when considering 21 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Amazon overall takes an average of 31 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Amazon as a Software Engineer according to 21 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 22%
Skills test: 22%
One on one interview: 19%
Personality test: 15%
Background check: 11%
IQ intelligence test: 4%
Other: 4%
Group panel interview: 4%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2015
Interview
I was contacted by HR recruiter from Amazon. After first screening phone call with HR I had 45 minutes phone interview. The interview included shared dashboard where I had to write code. I hadn't prepared to the phone interview and it was my big mistake. Two main findings for myself from this experience: practice coding using paper/whiteboard/notepad and refresh you memory about algorithms and data structures before interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Return k most frequent words in the text. Subsequent questions: what if we have very large text file? Can we distribute this process for multiple machines? What if we have limited memory?
Recruiter screen, online assessment, technical interviews, and behavioral rounds focused heavily on Amazon Leadership Principles. The process was structured, with a strong emphasis on problem-solving, coding skills, and examples demonstrating impact and ownership.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target