For experienced engineers, Amazon's SDE interview process depends on your level. According to Amazon's own prep pages, SDE II candidates take an online assessment and then a loop of four 55-minute interviews, while SDE III (senior) candidates do a 60-minute technical phone screen with a senior leader and then a loop of five 55-minute interviews. Every loop mixes live coding, at least one system design question and two or three Leadership Principle questions per interviewer, and typically includes a Bar Raiser from outside the hiring team; Amazon aims to share the outcome within five business days.
This guide is for candidates with industry experience. Students and recent graduates follow a separate track, covered in the Amazon new grad interview process.
The process at a glance: SDE II vs SDE III
Amazon publishes a prep page for each level (commonly called L5 and L6 internally). Side by side:
| Stage | SDE II | SDE III / Senior SDE |
|---|---|---|
| First technical step | Online assessment on HackerRank: two coding questions in 90 minutes, then a system design scenarios section and a work style survey | 60-minute technical phone screen with a senior leader: about half Leadership Principles, half coding and system design |
| First response | Result within two days of finishing the OA | Amazon aims to respond within two business days |
| Interview loop | Four 55-minute interviews | Five 55-minute interviews |
| System design | At least one question | At least one question; the prep page covers both high-level and low-level design |
| Behavioral | Two or three Leadership Principle questions per interviewer | Two or three Leadership Principle questions per interviewer |
| Outcome | Within five business days of the loop | Within five business days of the loop |
Amazon's general FAQ adds that steps vary slightly by role and that the process averages three to six weeks. Some third-party guides also report that experienced SDE II candidates may skip the OA and start with a recruiter call and technical phone screen instead. Reports conflict, so treat your recruiter's description as the final word.
SDE II: the online assessment
Amazon says every SDE II candidate completes an OA, and all three sections must be finished to submit:
- Coding (timed, 90 minutes). Two questions in HackerRank. Your code must compile for every question to move forward, the timer keeps running even if you exit, and efficient solutions earn more points than brute force.
- System design (untimed). Not a diagram. You rate possible actions in work scenarios with simulated peers, managers and stakeholders, with a focus on maintainability, trade-offs and ambiguity.
- Work style (untimed). Multiple-choice questions measured against the Leadership Principles. Amazon says there is nothing to study for it.
Amazon's two SDE II pages estimate the untimed sections slightly differently (15 and 10 minutes on one, 20 and 8 on the other), so block out the two hours Amazon recommends. You get seven days to complete it and hear back within two days. One OA covers multiple SDE II roles; if you do not advance, Amazon suggests reapplying after six months.
Mainstream languages are accepted, including Java, Python, C++, C#, Go, JavaScript and Kotlin. The assessment must be done on your own, under the rules Amazon sets for it. Question styles and practice topics are in our Amazon online assessment guide.
SDE III: the technical phone screen
Amazon's published senior path has no OA. A senior leader runs a 60-minute screen over Zoom or Amazon Chime, split roughly evenly between Leadership Principle questions and coding plus system design. Amazon's coding tips are worth following literally:
- Ask clarifying questions first: optimize for time or space? Any input limits?
- State the time and space complexity of every solution.
- Think aloud, cover edge cases and handle large inputs.
Amazon also lists what interviewers ask themselves afterward: did you find most of the bugs, consider alternate approaches, test your own code, use language idioms correctly, and is the code correct and efficient? Use that as your self-review checklist in practice. Amazon aims to respond within two business days.
The loop: what the four or five interviews cover
The loop is a series of 55-minute interviews with members of Amazon's software development community. Each interviewer is assigned specific competencies, some technical and some drawn from the Leadership Principles, so avoid telling the same story twice. Amazon's SDE prep pages say to expect three separate interviews on coding competencies plus at least one system design question:
| Competency | What Amazon says it looks for |
|---|---|
| Data structures and algorithms | How common structures (trees, hash maps, lists, arrays, queues) work, their runtimes and memory use, and the trade-offs of traversals, divide and conquer, and BFS versus DFS. Understanding, not rote memorization. |
| Problem solving | An ambiguous prompt you have to clarify. Amazon suggests splitting your time three ways: uncover the requirements, implement a first pass that covers them, then extend the solution as requirements change. |
| Logical and maintainable code | Descriptive names, clear separation of concerns across methods and classes, extensible code instead of one function that does everything, and test names that describe the requirements. |
| System design | A design that is practical, accurate, efficient, reliable, optimized and scalable, which you complete and validate by asking the interviewer questions. |
Every coding round means syntactically correct code written without an IDE (Amazon suggests practicing in Livecode), no pseudocode, and a time and space complexity answer for almost every question. Amazon's stated main criteria are code that is scalable, robust and well-tested, with edge cases and bad input handled.
The exact split varies by team. Third-party guides describe a typical loop as three coding interviews and one system design interview, with the hiring manager among the interviewers. How a five-interview SDE III loop uses its extra slot varies, and none of this is guaranteed. What is consistent is that Leadership Principle questions show up in every interview. For remote loops, expect Zoom or Amazon Chime, and possibly a second Amazonian shadowing, which Amazon says does not affect the outcome.
System design: how the bar rises from SDE II to SDE III
Amazon describes an SDE II as designing solutions with the team and trading off feature work against operational work, and an SDE III as holding a system-wide architectural view across multiple scalable systems. The senior prep page spells out what that means in the interview:
- Scope it like a customer conversation. Who is it for, what do they assume without saying it (fast, secure), and what happens at twice or ten times the load?
- High-level design. Roughly five to seven blocks, using standard abstractions such as load balancers, horizontally scaled app servers, NoSQL stores, message queues and rate limiters.
- Low-level design. One subsystem in depth: a data model, an object-oriented class design or an API contract.
- Operations and resilience. Metrics, bottlenecks, failure points, redundancy and logging, not only the happy path.
- Trade-offs. When two designs would work, compare them, pick one and justify it.
Amazon says it wants broad design knowledge plus expertise in one area; if an interviewer steers into unfamiliar territory, say so and suggest a topic you know. Review distributed systems, service-oriented architecture, caching, load balancing, non-relational databases, microservices and sharding. Amazon's resource list even includes object-oriented classics such as a parking lot.
Leadership Principles: the half experienced hires underprepare
Amazon has 16 Leadership Principles, and a significant portion of each interview covers how you have applied them. Each interviewer typically asks two or three behavioral questions, so a four- or five-interview loop means roughly 8 to 15 of them. Amazon says it does not ask brain teasers.
For experienced hires the bar is depth: Amazon tells senior candidates to be ready to go deep into the details of past work. From Amazon's own guidance:
- Use recent situations, and say “I” for what you did, not “we”.
- Back results with metrics where they exist.
- Bring risks, mistakes and growth, not only wins.
- Leave out confidential details, and do not bother memorizing the principles.
A story bank that fits SDE II and SDE III loops:
| Principle | Story to have ready |
|---|---|
| Ownership | A problem outside your strict scope that you drove to a fix, plus the mechanism that kept it fixed |
| Dive Deep | A bug or performance issue you found by digging through data, logs or metrics |
| Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit | A design decision you disagreed with, how you made your case, and how you committed afterward |
| Deliver Results | Shipping something important under a hard constraint |
| Earn Trust | A mistake you owned openly and what you changed because of it |
| Hire and Develop the Best | Mentoring or growing another engineer (Amazon lists mentoring as part of the SDE II job) |
| Invent and Simplify / Think Big | A simplification or architecture change that removed complexity or opened up new options |
| Customer Obsession | A trade-off you made for the customer, ideally with a measurable outcome |
Eight to ten stories usually cover a loop if each can answer two or three principles. For what every principle means, see all 16 Amazon Leadership Principles explained; for answer structure and follow-ups, read how to pass the Amazon behavioral interview.
The Bar Raiser and the debrief
Your loop will typically include a Bar Raiser, whom Amazon describes as someone from another team focused on hiring quality. Bar Raisers are volunteers, nominated by managers or peers and trained over several months by shadowing experienced Bar Raisers. Amazon says the program's goal is that every new hire is better than half of their would-be peers in similar roles.
- Treat every interviewer the same. You may not know which interviewer is the Bar Raiser, and Amazon says there is no need to tailor your answers to an interviewer's role.
- The Bar Raiser runs the debrief. Interviewers share their assessments with the Bar Raiser and hiring manager, and the Bar Raiser keeps the discussion data-driven. Amazon says the two make the final decision together; outside accounts commonly describe it as an effective veto for either.
- The notes are the evidence. Amazon says interviewers type detailed notes during the interview to share with the rest of the team. Third-party guides add that each interviewer also rates you on a scale from strongly inclined to strongly not inclined. Specific, quantified answers survive into those notes; vague ones do not.
Amazon aims to give an outcome within five business days of the loop. Candidates and third-party guides also report, though Amazon's pages do not say so, that team matching can happen after the loop and that a loop can end in an offer at a different level from the one you applied for.
A four-week prep plan for experienced hires
- Week 1: coding without an IDE. Medium problems on arrays, hash maps, trees and graphs in a plain editor, stating complexity out loud and running Amazon's interviewer checklist on each solution.
- Week 2: maintainable code. Solve a problem, add a new requirement, refactor, and write a few tests. This is what the problem-solving and maintainable-code interviews probe.
- Week 3: system design at your level. Two or three full designs with scoping, five to seven blocks, one subsystem in low-level detail, failure modes and a defended trade-off.
- Week 4: stories and full mocks. Write eight to ten STAR stories, rehearse them out loud with follow-ups, and run one full mock loop back to back.
Behavioral answers are the easiest part to under-rehearse. If you have no one to drill you, a free AI mock interview in CoPilot Interview can stand in: paste the Amazon job description and your résumé, pick the level and a mix of behavioral, coding and system design questions, answer out loud, and get each answer scored with what worked and what to improve.
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Try a free AI mock interviewFAQ
How many rounds are in the Amazon SDE II interview?
Amazon's SDE II prep page lists an online assessment followed by an interview loop of four 55-minute interviews. Some candidates also have a recruiter call or phone screen along the way, so confirm the exact steps with your recruiter.
Do SDE III candidates take the Amazon online assessment?
Not on Amazon's published senior path. The SDE III prep page lists a 60-minute technical phone screen with a senior leader instead, followed by a loop of five 55-minute interviews, although some teams add an assessment and will tell you in advance.
What does the Bar Raiser do in an Amazon interview?
The Bar Raiser is a trained interviewer from outside the hiring team whose focus is long-term hiring quality. They interview you like anyone else, then facilitate the debrief and make the final hiring decision together with the hiring manager.
How long does the Amazon SDE hiring process take?
Amazon's FAQ says the process takes three to six weeks on average, depending on your availability and the interviewers'. Amazon aims to give you an update within two business days after a phone interview and within five business days after the loop.
Is there system design in the Amazon SDE II interview?
Yes. Amazon tells SDE II candidates to expect at least one system design question in the loop, and the online assessment also has a system design section where you rate possible actions in work scenarios rather than drawing a diagram.
How many Leadership Principle questions will I get?
Amazon says each interviewer typically asks two or three behavioral questions tied to the Leadership Principles. Across a four- or five-interview loop that adds up to roughly 8 to 15 questions, so prepare eight to ten flexible stories.