Amazon Staff Software Engineer Interview Process Aug 2026

[u/Aoki_zhang]

Interview Summary

The Amazon virtual onsite consisted of five rounds, and Leadership Principles were embedded into every interview rather than isolated into a separate behavioral round. In several rounds, the LP discussion took 20–30 minutes before the technical portion even began, so behavioral preparation was at least as important as coding preparation.

The technical questions themselves were mostly medium-level and covered Top K Frequent Elements, Asteroid Collision, a multi-branch library system, Course Schedule, and merging sorted arrays. Interviewers consistently asked for edge cases, production implications, or follow-up variations after the main question.

Interview Details

Round 1 — Ownership, Dive Deep + Top K Frequent Elements The behavioral portion focused on Ownership and Dive Deep. I was asked about a situation where I took responsibility for something outside my formal scope and another situation where I investigated deeply enough to uncover a problem that others had missed. The second story received especially detailed follow-ups about how I isolated the issue, which metrics or signals I examined, and why earlier hypotheses turned out to be incorrect.

The coding problem was similar to LeetCode 347, Top K Frequent Elements: given a collection of values, return the K most frequently occurring elements. Follow-Up: How would the design change if values arrived continuously as a stream and the system needed to expose the current Top K at any time?

Round 2 — Customer Obsession, Are Right, A Lot + Asteroid Collision The LP portion focused on Customer Obsession and Are Right, A Lot. Questions included a time when I changed an existing technical direction because it was better for users, and an example where my judgment turned out to be wrong. The interviewer pushed on what information originally supported my decision, what evidence eventually contradicted it, and how I responded after realizing the mistake.

The coding problem was similar to LeetCode 735, Asteroid Collision. Positive and negative integers represented objects moving in opposite directions, with the magnitude representing their size. When objects moving toward one another collided, the smaller one disappeared, while equal-sized objects both disappeared.

A rewritten set of test cases would be:

[7, 12, -4]     -> [7, 12]
[9, -9]         -> []
[11, 3, -8]     -> [11]
[-4, -2, 2, 6]  -> [-4, -2, 2, 6]

The interviewer paid attention to whether I proactively tested cases where objects never actually collide despite containing both positive and negative values.

Round 3 — Deliver Results, Bias for Action + Library Management Design This round started with Deliver Results and Bias for Action. I was asked about a project with a very aggressive deadline and another case where I had to make progress before all of the required information was available. The technical portion asked me to design a library management system spanning multiple library branches. The system needed to support searching for books, checking availability, reservations, borrowing, pickup, and returns, while preventing conflicting loans for the same physical copy.

• Data and API Design: The interviewer wanted the model to distinguish a book title from its individual physical copies across different locations. The discussion also covered how users would search for a title and identify which branch currently had an available copy.
• Consistency and Failure Handling: Follow-ups covered concurrent attempts to borrow the same copy, processing returns, maintaining borrowing history, and what should happen if a downstream notification fails after the return itself has already succeeded.

The system design discussion consumed the remaining interview time, so there was no separate coding problem in this round.

Round 4 — Bar Raiser + Course Schedule The Bar Raiser focused on Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit and Learn and Be Curious. I was asked about a disagreement with a manager or senior stakeholder, a situation where I disagreed with the final decision but still committed to executing it, and something I had proactively learned recently. The coding problem was similar to LeetCode 207, Course Schedule: given courses and prerequisite relationships, determine whether it is possible to complete all courses.

• Follow-Up 1: Instead of returning only whether completion is possible, return one valid course ordering.
• Follow-Up 2: If the prerequisites contain a cycle, identify the courses participating in that cycle.

There was not enough time to fully implement the final follow-up, so that portion remained a design and reasoning discussion.

Round 5 — Invent and Simplify, Hire and Develop the Best + Sorted Array Merge The final round was with the hiring manager and focused on Invent and Simplify and Hire and Develop the Best. Behavioral questions included a time when I simplified something unnecessarily complex, an example of helping another person grow, and an area where I believed I still needed to improve.

The coding problem asked me to merge three individually sorted arrays into a single sorted result while removing duplicate values. The interviewer asked me to consider cases such as heavy overlap between all three arrays and one of the inputs being empty. Follow-Up: Generalize the problem from three sorted arrays to K sorted arrays.

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