Amazon
E-commerce and cloud computing giant with AWS, the world's leading cloud platform.
5 Rounds
~28 Days
Very Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
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hard
Design a highly available, scalable web application on AWS that handles sudden spikes in traffic, similar to Prime Day. The application consists of a stateless web tier and a relational database.
#Auto Scaling
#ALB
#RDS Multi-AZ
#ElastiCache
#High Availability
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design an event-driven serverless architecture to process image uploads. When a user uploads an image, it needs to be resized, watermarked, and its metadata stored in a database.
#Serverless
#Lambda
#S3
#DynamoDB
#Event-Driven Architecture
Cloud Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
A financial services client requires a Disaster Recovery plan with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of 5 minutes and a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of 1 hour. How would you design this across two AWS regions?
#Disaster Recovery
#RPO/RTO
#Cross-Region Replication
#Route53
Data Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a scalable Data Lake architecture on AWS to support both ad-hoc querying by data scientists and daily aggregated reporting by BI tools.
#Data Lake
#AWS S3
#AWS Athena
#AWS Glue
#Parquet/Iceberg
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time streaming pipeline to process and aggregate Amazon clickstream data to detect anomalous user behavior (e.g., bot scraping) within a 1-minute window.
#AWS Kinesis
#Apache Flink
#Stream Processing
#Anomaly Detection
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an ETL pipeline to migrate 100TB of historical order data from an on-premise Oracle database to AWS Redshift, ensuring zero data loss and minimal downtime.
#Data Migration
#AWS DMS
#AWS S3
#AWS Redshift
Data Scientist
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System Design
•
hard
Design a machine learning system to rank search results for Amazon.com. How do you balance relevance, profitability, and shipping speed?
#Learning to Rank
#Multi-objective Optimization
#Personalization
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a machine learning system to detect fraudulent reviews on Amazon in real-time. How do you handle cold-start problems for newly created accounts?
#Fraud Detection
#Classification
#Graph Neural Networks
#Cold Start
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a real-time product recommendation system for the Amazon homepage that personalizes items based on a user's browsing history from the last 10 minutes.
#Recommender Systems
#Real-time Inference
#Streaming Data
#Collaborative Filtering
Machine Learning Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design the ML architecture for Amazon's autocomplete/typeahead search feature. How do you balance personalization with global popularity while maintaining sub-50ms latency?
#Search Ranking
#NLP
#Tries
#Personalization
Machine Learning Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a machine learning system to predict the estimated time of arrival (ETA) for Amazon Prime packages. What features would you use and how would you handle weather anomalies?
#Regression
#Geospatial Data
#Time Series
#Feature Engineering
Product Manager
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System Design
•
hard
Design a system for Amazon Lockers that handles package routing, locker availability, and user notifications during peak holiday seasons.
#Scalability
#Logistics
#Microservices
#Edge Cases
Product Manager
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System Design
•
hard
Design the backend architecture for the 'Customers who bought this item also bought' recommendation widget on the Amazon product detail page.
#Recommendation Engines
#Data Pipelines
#Low Latency
Software Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design a system to track the top 10 best-selling products on Amazon in real-time across different categories.
#Stream Processing
#Top K Problem
#Count-Min Sketch
#Kafka/Kinesis
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a flash sale system for Amazon Prime Day where a highly sought-after item has only 100 units in stock, but millions of users are trying to buy it simultaneously. How do you prevent overselling?
#Distributed Locking
#Redis
#Concurrency
#Database Transactions
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the backend for Amazon Prime Video's 'Continue Watching' feature, ensuring cross-device synchronization with sub-second latency.
#Microservices
#WebSockets
#Data Synchronization
#Cassandra/DynamoDB
Software Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design the Amazon shopping cart service. It needs to be highly available, handle millions of concurrent users during Prime Day, and ensure that items added to the cart are never lost, even in the event of database node failures.
#High Availability
#DynamoDB
#Eventual Consistency
#Conflict Resolution
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
SimulateUnwritten Rules
Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.