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Amazon L5 (SDE II) Software Engineer Interview Guide
A comprehensive guide to the Amazon L5 Software Engineer interview process.
The Amazon L5 (SDE II) interview process starts with a recruiter screen, followed by either an online assessment or technical phone screen (sometimes both), then moves to a virtual onsite loop of four interviews, and finally team matching if needed. Your onsite loop includes two coding rounds, one system design round, and one additional round that's either low-level design or extra coding depending on the team's needs. There's also a bar raiser interview woven into this loop, conducted by an experienced Amazon interviewer from outside your target team. The whole process typically takes 4-8 weeks from initial contact to offer, though scheduling logistics can stretch it longer.
What makes L5 different from adjacent levels is the expectation that you can handle both coding and design work competently. Unlike L4 candidates who skip design rounds entirely, you'll need to demonstrate solid architectural thinking in both high-level system design and object-oriented design scenarios.
The famous bar raiser interview carries significant weight in your final decision, and every single round incorporates Amazon's Leadership Principles heavily. In fact, each technical interview typically starts (or ends) with 20-30 minutes of behavioral questions before diving into coding or design work.
The interview consists of 5 total rounds:
- Recruiter Intro Call
- Online Assessment (OA)
- Technical Phone Screen (Coding)
- Onsite (Usually virtual)
- Coding (2 rounds)
- System Design
- Low-Level Design or Extra Coding
- Bar Raiser
Let's break down each round in detail.
Interview Rounds
Recruiter Intro Call
This thirty-minute conversation kicks off your Amazon journey and sets the tone for everything that follows. While it might feel casual, don't mistake it for a throwaway screening call. Your recruiter is evaluating whether you're worth their time to shepherd through the full process.
The conversation usually starts with a resume walkthrough where you'll explain your career progression and highlight relevant experience. They're not looking for a detailed technical deep dive here, but they want to understand your background and see if you can clearly articulate your professional story. After that, they'll explain the role expectations and give you an overview of Amazon's interview process, including those famous Leadership Principles you've probably heard about.
Most recruiters will touch on the Leadership Principles during this call, sometimes asking basic behavioral questions like "Tell me about a time you had to make a difficult decision" or "Describe a situation where you had to work with a challenging team member." They're not doing a full behavioral assessment yet, but they want to see if you understand what Amazon values and whether you can speak to these principles with real examples.
The recruiter will also gauge your genuine interest in Amazon and the specific role. They've seen plenty of candidates who are just shopping around or haven't done basic research about the company. Show you've thought about why you want to work at Amazon specifically, beyond general attraction to well-paying tech companies.
While this round is generally non-evaluative, it can definitely end your process if there's a clear mismatch or if you come across as unprepared or uninterested. The recruiter controls your pipeline, so making a good impression here smooths the path for everything that comes after.
Online Assessment (Coding & Work Simulation)
The Online Assessment hits you early in the process, usually right after your recruiter call wraps up successfully. This two-hour marathon combines traditional algorithmic coding with Amazon's newer behavioral evaluation tools, and it's become a significant gatekeeper for L5 candidates since they rolled it out in 2021.
You'll tackle two coding problems in about 90 minutes, typically on HackerRank's platform. Expect solid medium-difficulty questions, occasionally dipping into hard territory, covering the usual suspects like arrays, strings, graphs, dynamic programming, or tree traversals. The problems are designed to test both your algorithmic thinking and your ability to implement clean solutions under time pressure. You're completely on your own here since it's unproctored, which means no hints or clarification from an interviewer if you get stuck on edge cases or problem interpretation.
"Time felt like it flew by."
— Recent Amazon L5 candidate
After the coding gauntlet comes the Work Simulation and Work Style assessment. Amazon uses these sections to evaluate how well you align with their Leadership Principles through situational judgment scenarios. You'll face workplace dilemmas where you need to choose responses that demonstrate customer obsession, ownership, bias for action, and the other cultural pillars Amazon cares about. The scenarios often involve prioritizing conflicting demands, handling team conflicts, or making decisions with incomplete information.
You're evaluated on four main aspects:
- Coding Accuracy and Efficiency: Your ability to solve algorithmic problems correctly within tight time constraints, demonstrating solid understanding of data structures and algorithms.
- Problem-Solving Under Pressure: How you approach complex challenges and optimize solutions when the clock is ticking.
- Leadership Principle Alignment: Your responses in the work simulation showing you understand and embody Amazon's core values, especially around customer-centricity and ownership.
- Solution Completeness: Writing code that handles edge cases and thinking through the full problem space, including all scenarios beyond the main use case.
Many candidates spend too long perfecting the first problem and run out of time on the second. Even partial solutions with solid reasoning can help your case, so don't get stuck polishing code when you could be making progress on the next question. For the behavioral portions, consistency matters more than trying to game the system. Answer authentically but keep Amazon's principles front of mind.
Technical Phone Screen
The technical phone screen sits between your online assessment and the full onsite loop, acting as a live coding gate that determines whether you're worth bringing in for the bigger conversation. Not every candidate gets this round since Amazon sometimes relies solely on the OA for initial technical screening, but if you do get called for a phone screen, treat it as your chance to demonstrate that you can actually code under pressure with a human watching.
This 45-minute session typically runs as an audio-only call paired with a shared coding environment like CoderPad or HackerRank. You won't see your interviewer, which can feel awkward at first, but it lets you focus entirely on the problem without worrying about visual cues or body language. The format is straightforward: brief introductions, then straight into one or two coding problems that you'll solve while talking through your approach.
The problems themselves hit that sweet spot of medium difficulty, similar to what you'd find in LeetCode's medium category. Think array manipulations, string processing, basic graph traversals, or simple dynamic programming. The interviewer wants to see that you can recognize patterns, choose appropriate data structures, and implement clean solutions within tight time constraints.
"I struggled a bit on my second leetcode interview (LC 1152). I recognized the problem, but the "cleaner" solution was using a built in library func. that I was unfamiliar with. I eventually got what seemed like a working solution, but expected that my confusion and time taken to understand the problem would fail me here. In the end I think it helped that I spent so much time clarifying the question, because it showed how I could deal with uncertainty and confusion."
— Recent Amazon L5 candidate
After introductions and problem explanation, you realistically have about 30 minutes of pure coding time. If there are two problems, that's roughly 15 minutes each, which doesn't leave room for extensive debugging or multiple false starts. The interviewer may throw in a couple of Leadership Principle questions at the end if you finish early, but the technical problem solving is the main event.
Amazon evaluates you on four main aspects:
- Algorithmic Problem Solving: Your ability to quickly understand the problem, identify the right approach, and work toward a solution without getting stuck on dead ends.
- Code Implementation Quality: Writing syntactically correct, logically sound code that actually executes properly, with complete implementations rather than pseudocode or half-finished attempts.
- Communication: Clearly explaining your thought process, asking clarifying questions when needed, and walking through your solution as you build it.
- Technical Depth: Understanding time and space complexity, handling edge cases, and demonstrating solid fundamentals in data structures and algorithms.
The key to crushing this round is practicing coding problems out loud in a minimal environment. Don't rely on your IDE's autocomplete or debugger during prep since you won't have those luxuries during the actual interview. Get comfortable explaining your approach before you start coding, and always test your solution with a few examples once you think you're done.
Live, up-to-date
Most commonly asked Coding questions
Amazon
Mid-level
Onsite
Coding Interviews
The two onsite coding rounds are largely an extension of your phone screen. Each runs for 60 minutes with a shared coding environment, but don't expect to spend that full hour writing code. These interviews follow Amazon's signature format of starting with 20-30 minutes of Leadership Principle questions before diving into the technical work.
While the phone screen tested basic competency with medium-difficulty questions, the onsite rounds push into medium-hard territory and sometimes venture into truly challenging algorithmic problems. You might get one substantial problem that has multiple parts or follow-up variations, or you could face two separate problems if you move quickly through the first one. The interviewers want to see optimal solutions with proper complexity analysis and robust edge case handling, demonstrating coding proficiency at the senior level.
The behavioral portion hits harder here too. Your interviewers will dig deep into specific Leadership Principles, often asking follow-up questions about your examples that can stretch the discussion well beyond the typical "tell me about a time" format. They're evaluating whether you can embody Amazon's culture while solving technical problems under pressure.
The interviewers expect you to write working code with complete implementations, and they'll often ask you to trace through your solution with test cases or discuss how you'd modify it for different constraints.
These rounds often cover different algorithmic areas, so one might focus on graph problems while another tests dynamic programming or string manipulation. The variety ensures they get a comprehensive view of your technical range rather than just your ability to solve one type of problem well.
"I was surprised by the lack of emphasis on leetcode problems and the correctness of your solutions. they are looking to see the thought process and approach not the ability of remember and reproduce optimum solutions."
— Recent Amazon L5 candidate
Live, up-to-date
Most commonly asked Coding questions
Amazon
Mid-level
System Design Interview (High-Level Design)
The system design round represents your biggest departure from pure coding, testing whether you can think architecturally about building scalable services that millions of customers might actually use. This 60-minute session uses an online whiteboard tool and is often conducted by the hiring manager for the team you're joining, which makes it doubly important for your final decision.
The behavioral portion hits different themes here since you're talking to a potential manager. They want to hear about times you've owned technical decisions, dealt with ambiguous requirements, or pushed back on unrealistic timelines. Think bigger picture stories that show you can operate beyond writing code.
Once you get to the actual design portion, expect prompts like "Design a URL shortener like bit.ly" or "Design a chat service for millions of users." The problems aren't meant to stump you with obscure distributed systems knowledge. Instead, they're testing whether you can break down a complex system into manageable components and reason about how those pieces work together at scale. You'll typically have about 30 minutes to walk through your entire design, which moves pretty quickly.
The discussion stays at a high level compared to low-level design rounds. You're drawing boxes for web servers, databases, caches, and load balancers, not designing specific classes or writing code. However, you still need to think through API contracts, data models, and how different services communicate. The interviewer will often ask follow-up questions about handling increased load, dealing with failures, or adding new features to test how adaptable your design is.
The evaluation focuses on four key areas:
- Architectural Thinking: Your ability to break complex problems into logical components and design appropriate high-level solutions that actually work.
- Scalability & Trade-off Analysis: Understanding system constraints and explaining design choices while considering alternatives and their implications.
- Requirement Analysis: Effectively clarifying scope and key requirements before jumping into solutions, then revisiting them throughout the design.
- Communication & Diagram Clarity: Articulating your design clearly using diagrams and explanations that make it easy for others to follow your reasoning.
What makes this round different for L5 candidates is the expectation that you can handle the design independently without heavy guidance. You're not expected to know every detail about Amazon's internal systems, but you should demonstrate solid fundamentals around caching strategies, database choices, and handling scale. The bar sits between junior engineers who might struggle with basic architectural concepts and senior engineers who need to design organization-wide systems.
Live, up-to-date
Most commonly asked System Design questions
Amazon
Mid-level
Low-Level Design Interview (Object-Oriented Design)
This round appears in some L5 loops as an alternative to additional coding interviews, depending on your target team's preferences and what they want to evaluate further. If you get this instead of extra coding, you're looking at a completely different skill set test that focuses on code structure rather than distributed systems architecture.
The 60-minute session follows the same Amazon format we've covered - behavioral questions first, then technical work. The LP portion here often explores ownership and technical decision-making since you're showing how you'd organize code for team collaboration.
Once you get to the actual design portion, expect prompts like "Design a parking lot management system," "Design a chess game," or "Design a library management system." These aren't distributed systems problems. Instead, you're defining classes, their attributes and methods, relationships between objects, and how they interact to solve the business problem. You'll typically sketch out something resembling a UML diagram while explaining your thought process, though it doesn't need to be formally correct UML syntax.
The technical depth here focuses on object-oriented design principles rather than scalability concerns. Your interviewer wants to see you apply SOLID principles, choose appropriate design patterns, and create a structure that can handle future changes without major refactoring. They might ask follow-up questions like "How would you add motorcycle parking?" or "What if we wanted to implement surge pricing?" to test whether your design is extensible.
Success depends on demonstrating four core competencies:
- Object-Oriented Modeling: Your ability to identify the right entities and translate business requirements into classes with clear responsibilities and appropriate relationships.
- Use of Design Patterns: Applying patterns like Strategy, Factory, or Observer when they actually make sense, with clear reasoning for pattern choices rather than superficial name-dropping.
- Adaptability of Design: Creating a structure that accommodates new features or changes without requiring extensive rewrites of existing code.
- Clarity of Thought: Explaining your design decisions logically and being able to discuss trade-offs between different approaches.
With roughly 30-35 minutes for design work after behavioral questions, focus on core structure and key interactions rather than getting lost in method definitions. Start with main classes and their relationships, then drill down into specifics only when prompted.
This round often serves as the alternative to an additional coding interview, so teams use it to evaluate your software engineering maturity beyond just algorithmic problem solving.
"There was more than one round of low level design. The behavioral questions took up more than half of every interview."
— Recent Amazon L5 candidate
Success here shows you can think about code organization, maintainability, and design quality that matters in real software development work.
Live, up-to-date
Most commonly asked Object Oriented Design questions
Amazon
Mid-level
Bar Raiser Interview
The Bar Raiser interview stands apart from every other round in your Amazon loop because it's conducted by someone who has absolutely no stake in whether you get hired. This 60-minute session brings in an experienced Amazon interviewer from completely outside your target team, and their job is to act as the final gatekeeper ensuring you actually meet or exceed the hiring bar for L5 engineers across the entire company.
What makes this round particularly intense is that it's almost entirely behavioral, diving deeper into Amazon's Leadership Principles than any other interview you'll face. While your other rounds might spend 20-30 minutes on behavioral questions before moving to technical work, the Bar Raiser dedicates the full hour to understanding how you think, make decisions, and handle complex situations. They'll pick apart your STAR examples with follow-up questions that can stretch a single story across 15-20 minutes of discussion.
The Bar Raiser might ask something like "Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with incomplete information" and then drill into the specifics with questions like "What other options did you consider?" "Who else was involved in this decision?" "What was the ultimate outcome six months later?" "If you had to do it again, what would you change?" They want to see whether you actually live Amazon's principles in challenging real-world scenarios, going beyond theoretical understanding.
Occasionally, Bar Raisers throw in an unexpected technical question toward the end, especially if they want to test how you handle pressure or if there's some uncertainty about your technical abilities from other rounds. This curveball might be a quick coding problem or a design scenario, and it's designed to see how you react when you're mentally drained and not expecting technical work.
The Bar Raiser makes their decision based on three critical factors:
- Leadership Principle Alignment: The depth and authenticity of your examples demonstrating ownership, customer obsession, and other core principles in real situations.
- Overall Hiring Bar: Whether you'd raise the talent bar at Amazon considering your technical skills, behavioral competencies, and growth potential together.
- Adaptability Under Pressure: How you handle unexpected questions or scenarios, especially if technical work appears late in what seemed like a purely behavioral interview.
The Bar Raiser represents Amazon's commitment to maintaining consistent hiring standards across all teams and locations. They've seen hundreds of candidates and know exactly what separates strong L5 engineers from those who aren't quite ready yet.
"Bar raiser was very challenging. I could feel the bar raiser was a different level."
— Recent Amazon L5 candidate
Live, up-to-date
Most commonly asked Leadership Principles questions
Amazon
Mid-level
1. Give me an example of a calculated risk that you have taken where speed was critical.
2. Tell me about a time you had a conflict with a coworker. How did you resolve it?
3. Tell me about a project where the requirements were not clear or kept changing. How did you adapt and maintain productivity?
4. Can you share an example where you resolved a significant conflict between different teams or departments in your organization?
5. What is the hardest challenge you've overcome at work?
What to Expect
Based on feedback from candidates who've been through Amazon's L5 SDE2 interview process, here are key insights about what you'll actually experience beyond the standard format.
What Surprised Candidates Most
The sheer volume of behavioral questioning catches most candidates off-guard. "I was asked LP questions for almost 30 minutes with a lot of follow ups. I had very little time for system design round," one candidate noted. What feels like a technical interview actually dedicates the majority of time to Leadership Principles, with behavioral components often consuming "more than half of every interview." Every single round integrates substantial behavioral evaluation, including rounds beyond the Bar Raiser.
Many candidates discover that Amazon interviewers actively provide hints and guidance during technical portions, but your response to this feedback becomes part of the evaluation. "Interviewers do give hints, a big part of evaluation is how you receive and deal with feedback," shared one successful candidate. The ability to incorporate suggestions gracefully and build upon interviewer input matters as much as your initial approach.
The technical evaluation philosophy differs significantly from other companies. Rather than focusing on perfect algorithmic solutions, Amazon emphasizes "method and basics" with "less focus on leetcoding and more focus on method." One candidate was surprised by "the lack of emphasis on correctness of your solutions" and instead found evaluators more interested in thought process and systematic problem-solving approaches.
Some candidates face unexpected process variations. "Had to do 2 onsites" noted one candidate, while others discovered additional design rounds: "There was more than one round of low level design." The flexibility in Amazon's process means your specific loop might include variations based on team needs or initial performance signals.
Most Effective Preparation Strategies
Successful candidates consistently emphasized the transformative impact of our mock interviews for both coding and system design preparation. "Mock interviews for system design and coding interviews" proved essential, with multiple candidates crediting intensive mock practice as the key differentiator in their preparation. Our Guided Practice system design module received particularly strong praise: "Hello Interview is pure gold mine. I had exponential improvement after doing hello interview for 15 days continuously."
The structured approach to system design preparation through our platform stood out repeatedly. "I feel one should prepare through all the system design questions on hellointerview, irrespective of your level. The blogs and videos do a great job of giving ideas to deep dive and display your competencies, breaking it down level wise." One first-time system design candidate emphasized: "Using hello interview. I mean this is my first-time EVER doing a system design interview and I nailed it!"
For behavioral preparation, candidates found success with comprehensive story development covering all Leadership Principles. "Amazon focuses a lot on their leadership principles. I would suggest preparing atleast 2 stories per leadership principle before hand (I personally had 10 stories, out of which some could be delivered in ways covering different leadership principles)." The investment in thorough LP preparation pays dividends across multiple rounds.
Our question lists proved valuable for understanding Amazon's specific problem patterns. Several candidates mentioned focusing on "Amazon-tagged" problems and using our past question compilations to understand the types of challenges they'd actually face, rather than generic algorithmic practice.
Top Tips from Successful Candidates
Develop a systematic tracking approach for your interview day. "Take notes during the power day to keep track of what LPs you are being asked. At times the questions may sound similar, but there are subtle differences. This will help minimize reuse of any stories." Managing story allocation across multiple rounds prevents awkward repetition and ensures you demonstrate breadth.
Structure your behavioral responses using the four-element framework that successful candidates swear by: "Make sure your answer to the behavioral question includes the following four key elements — Proactive and Reactive, Data-Driven, Impact-Oriented (Include metrics, percentages, increases/decreases, or efficiency gains), and Influence (Demonstrates impact on your direct team or across the organization)." This framework consistently impressed interviewers with its completeness.
Adopt a collaborative communication style during technical rounds. "Communicate, build ground up from simple to optimal solution if possible, and keep and eye out for tips." Starting with basic approaches and building complexity demonstrates clear thinking while staying receptive to interviewer guidance.
Prepare extensively beyond what feels necessary. "The earlier the better. You should have time to make mistakes and stumble upon first-time problems" and "Anyone telling you that preparation is a matter of X months are lying. Our brains are wired differently." Start your preparation timeline with buffer for multiple learning cycles rather than cramming.
Additional Insights
Amazon's Leadership Principle questions often come from a curated list your recruiter provides. "The leadership questions were selected from a list of topics that was sent by email from my recruiter" - ask your recruiter for this list if it's not automatically provided, as it helps you prepare more targeted examples.
Technical problems frequently deviate from standard LeetCode patterns. "The coding questions were not particularly hard or typical leetcode. One was easy not in leetcode." Focus on problem-solving methodology rather than memorizing specific solutions, since Amazon often uses original problems or unusual variations.
Study materials beyond algorithmic preparation prove valuable. "Lots of LeetCode problems and read the Design Data Intensive Applications book, from Martin Kleppmann" - this book specifically helps with system design discussions that go beyond basic scalability topics.
The interview process can extend beyond the standard loop. Some candidates reported multiple onsite rounds or additional evaluation steps, so maintain flexibility in your schedule and preparation mindset rather than assuming a fixed timeline to decision.
Authenticity in behavioral responses outweighs attempting to game the system. "Don't lie in the behavioral at all. You might think you can get away with it, chances are you won't since the bar raisers and other interviewers are experienced interviewers and they'll catch you straight away." Prepare genuine examples that honestly reflect your experience rather than fabricating ideal scenarios.
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