Amazon·Software Engineer

Amazon Software Engineer interview experience

No offer

Posted Sep 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

My Amazon SDE loop didn’t start with a long set of onsite rounds for me—it began with a more conversational phone screening that mixed leadership expectations with a real coding exercise.

The phone screen included DSA plus the kind of leadership-principles questions where you had to talk through your thinking and then connect it to your experience.

On the technical side, I got an array problem about computing the minimum cost of adding numbers under a specific cost definition. I solved it within about 10 minutes with working logic, and it felt like a solid performance relative to what I’d heard others experience. Then the process shifted into design thinking: I also had to respond to a high-level system/design prompt about building an employee directory so employees could

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