Software Engineer interview
at Amazon.

Tell-me-about-a-time stories on ownership, conflict, and impact — scored against this company's real values.

1. 01 Tell me about a time you took end-to-end ownership of a problem outside your immediate area because no one else would (Ownership).
2. 02 Describe a time you simplified an over-engineered system or process and the impact it had (Invent and Simplify).
3. 03 Give me an example of a time you disagreed with your manager or a senior engineer about a technical approach, argued your case, and then committed to their decision (Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit).
4. 04 Tell me about a production incident where you had to dive deep to find the true root cause rather than apply a quick patch (Dive Deep).

The hard screen for the craft itself — talked through out loud, not whiteboarded in your head.

1. 01 Implement a thread-safe least-recently-used (LRU) cache and explain how you would scale it to handle Amazon catalog read traffic.
2. 02 Given a stream of customer order events, design a data structure to return the top-K most-ordered products in the last hour with low latency.
3. 03 How would you detect and resolve a deadlock between two services updating shared inventory records, and how would you prevent it?
4. 04 Design a rate limiter for an Amazon API gateway endpoint and discuss how it behaves under bursty traffic across multiple hosts.

Open-ended design of the systems this company actually runs, with the interviewer probing your tradeoffs.

1. 01 Design Amazon's order fulfillment pipeline from checkout through warehouse pick-pack-ship to delivery confirmation.
2. 02 Design a distributed inventory management system that keeps stock counts consistent across many fulfillment centers and prevents overselling.
3. 03 Design a notification service that sends Amazon order and shipment updates to customers across email, SMS, and push at high scale.
4. 04 Design a URL shortener / product-link service that handles the read and write volume of Amazon's catalog.