Amazon·Software Engineer

Amazon Software Engineer interview experience

Posted May 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

I had an Amazon phone screen for an SDE 2 role, and the question centered on task dependencies and execution order.

The setup was that I was given n tasks, and each task had a type (string/character) and a list of dependencies—other tasks that had to finish before it could run.

The rule was simple but the problem framing wasn’t: each task took 1 unit of time, and I had to figure out how to order execution based on the dependency graph. I remember focusing on figuring out the constraints correctly early, because once the dependencies are modeled wrong, everything downstream gets messy.

It was a clean, focused phone screen experience—less about breadth and more about getting the ordering logic right. By

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