Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 48% positive. To compare, the company-average is 57.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 24 days to get hired, when considering 3,650 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Amazon overall takes an average of 28 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Amazon as a Software Engineer according to 3,650 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 30%
One on one interview: 18%
Skills test: 17%
Presentation: 10%
Personality test: 7%
Group panel interview: 6%
IQ intelligence test: 5%
Background check: 4%
Other: 2%
Drug test: 2%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Vancouver, BC)
Interview
One manager started talking about high level business perspective and their clients' and stuff (I am not sure why coder who focuses on bug fixing or new feature development should worry about that). Then he asked me to write down class implementation on the whiteboard. I told him that I will be writing using PHP. He asked: "Does PHP have classes? Last time I used it, it was PHP version 3 and it didn't have classes". Wow, they guy missed the whole trend of web industry for the last 10 years!
Another manager asked me how I would deal with increasing web traffic and he started drawing load balancer on the whiteboard (to me load balancer seems more related to infrastructure engineer than to developer but whatever). I told him that I would rewrite the code using NodeJS speeding up application 10 times using asynchronized paradigm. He didn't know what NodeJS was.
Another interviewer who was developer said that they used Java at Amazon but he personally preferred to use C++. Well, again, C++ appeared decades ago. Within last 5-10 years so many new technologies were developed that Amazon seemingly missed.
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