Amazon Interview Roadmap
5 rounds · Coding #1, Coding #2, Coding #3, System Design, Bar Raiser. Prep strategy, system design patterns, and the exact focus areas Amazon tests at each stage.
Interview Process
| # | Round | Duration | Focus Areas |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Coding #1 | 60 min | DSA — 1–2 problems; LP questions woven in; code is not executed |
| 2 | Coding #2 | 60 min | DSA — 1–2 problems; different LP angle; follow-up depth questions |
| 3 | Coding #3 | 60 min | DSA + OOP/LLD depending on role; LP questions throughout |
| 4 | System Design | 60 min | HLD or LLD depending on seniority — microservices, event-driven, AWS-native preferred |
| 5 | Bar Raiser | 60 min | Calibration round by a trained third party — Leadership Principles, judgment, raises the bar |
Top Interview Questions
Sorted by reported frequency
Key Concepts to Master
A distributed system can only guarantee two of three: Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance.
Horizontal partitioning of a database across multiple machines to distribute load beyond a single server's capacity.
Asynchronous communication buffer between services. Decouples producers from consumers and provides durability during traffic spikes.
A shared cache layer across multiple nodes used to absorb read traffic from the primary database and reduce latency on hot data paths. The difference between a 2ms and a 200ms read at scale.
Content Delivery Network. A geographically distributed network of edge servers that caches content close to end users, reducing origin server load and cutting time-to-first-byte by 50–200ms depending on user location.
Object storage for unstructured binary data: images, videos, documents, ML model weights. Designed for durability and throughput at scale, not low-latency random access.