Software Development Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.2 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 61% positive. To compare, the company-average is 57.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Development Engineer roles take an average of 28 days to get hired, when considering 2,542 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Amazon overall takes an average of 28 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Amazon as a Software Development Engineer according to 2,542 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 29%
One on one interview: 21%
Skills test: 14%
Presentation: 11%
IQ intelligence test: 6%
Group panel interview: 6%
Personality test: 5%
Background check: 4%
Drug test: 2%
Other: 2%
Here are the most commonly searched roles for interview reports -
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jul 2011
Interview
The interview was with the development team and it consisted of 45 minutes of 4 back to back rounds of white board coding with 5 minutes break in between each rounds. Before the interview we had lunch with the team. Then I was taken to a presentation room where I had all the interviews. They said me that I could code in whatever language I was comfortable with.
Performed well in all but one. Waiting for the result.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
The first interviewer asked me to code a program to evaluate a post fix expression.
Second one asked me to design a Conway's Game of Life. (I had no idea what it was. The interviewer took 5 minutes to explain the game and then asked me to design and code).
In the next round, the interviewer gave me a binary tree and asked me to write all the data in a file and when the file is read back we should be able to construct the original binary tree.
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Calgary, AB) in Jun 2026
Interview
Online Assessment is the first step in the process. I didn’t have an HR phone screening and went straight to the OA after applying. It was sent to me about a week after I submitted my application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first question is LeetCode style algorithms question, and the second question gives a full stack repo (choice of Java, NodeJS, or Django) and asks to solve a backend issue which is causing a bug in the frontend. Unit tests must pass to pass the second question. You can run both backend/frontend indivdually or together
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2026
Interview
Recruiter reached out and set up an onsite loop after the initial steps. Four back to back rounds in one day. Two coding heavy rounds run by senior engineers, one round with the hiring manager, and one behavioral round with a bar raiser. Mix of leadership principles and data structures throughout. Heard back within a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard BFS grid problem. Given a grid, find the time for all cells to reach a target state where the spread happens one layer at a time.
How did you answer: Clarified the constraints, walked through the approach, then coded a clean BFS from all starting points at once. Tracked the number of layers until everything was covered.