Amazon System Design Interview Questions
16 system design questions reported by candidates who interviewed at Amazon, out of 499 Amazon questions we track. They average 3.7/5 difficulty (hard). Most common topics: System Design, Scaling, Caching, Concurrency. 16 were reported asked within the last year, most recently in October 2026.
Practice Amazon questions →Difficulty
- 3/5 — medium6
- 4/5 — hard9
- 5/5 — very hard1
Asked for SWE (12), MLE (7), Infra (6), RS (4)
Reported Amazon system design questions
Design a Shopping Cart Service With Inventory Consistency
4/5A system design question about the shopping cart service of a large retailer, focused on keeping carts fast while inventory stays exact. Expect to discuss when stock is held, how checkout avoids selling the same last unit twice, and how the service survives a flash sale.
asked October 2026System DesignE CommerceConsistencyDesign a URL Shortener with Aliases, Expiry and Click Analytics
3/5A system design question on a service that turns long web addresses into compact ones. Good answers size the traffic first, explain how codes stay unique across many machines without collisions, and keep the hot lookup path fast while reporting and cleanup work happen elsewhere.
asked October 2026System DesignUrl ShortenerKey Value StoreCore Dump Collection System Design
4/5This architecture interview question, frequently reported at Amazon, challenges candidates to design a robust pipeline for gathering, storing, and analyzing crash diagnostics from distributed infrastructure. Participants must address massive scale, durable binary storage, metadata extraction for efficient querying, and strict security policies. The complete architectural blueprint and expert review require a subscription.
asked July 2026StorageDistributed SystemsScalingDesign a Pizza Ordering and Fulfillment System (OOD)
3/5Master object-oriented design principles by architecting an end-to-end culinary fulfillment network, commonly featured in Amazon technical interviews. This challenge evaluates your capability to model complex real-world entities, manage concurrent asynchronous workflows, and design robust state machines that seamlessly coordinate customer customization, kitchen preparation stations, and last-mile delivery tracking. You will need to balance scalability, clean separation of concerns, and architectural extensibility while addressing tight constraints. To explore the complete architectural blueprint and review our expert model solution, unlock full platform access today.
asked July 2026OOP DesignState MachineDesign PatternsPerishable-Goods Tracking & Location System
3/5Tackling real-time inventory tracking for perishable goods is a compelling machine learning system design challenge frequently featured in screening rounds at Amazon. This scenario requires architects to design a scalable platform that monitors product lifecycles across numerous retail locations, seamlessly transitioning items to designated storage zones upon expiration while maintaining a reliable audit ledger. Candidates must address challenges related to spatial querying, data durability, and state synchronization at scale. Access to the comprehensive architectural blueprint and expert evaluation details requires a paid subscription.
asked June 2026DatabaseSchema DesignScalingDesign a Lab-Wide Experiment Platform for Embodied AI
4/5In this system design challenge reported at Amazon, you are tasked with architecting a comprehensive experimentation platform for embodied artificial intelligence and robotics research. The scenario requires supporting real-world telemetry logs, automated simulation generation, and iterative policy validation to address edge cases like perception failures in poor lighting. It assesses your ability to scale machine learning infrastructure for physical systems. Review the complete architectural blueprint and professional design recommendations by purchasing a subscription.
asked June 2026Ride-Hailing System Design (Uber)
3/5This system design challenge, reflecting real-world engineering queries at Amazon, centers on architecting a large-scale ride-matching platform capable of handling intense write loads from continuous driver location updates. Candidates must tackle geospatial indexing strategies, high-frequency data throttling, and low-latency cache utilization to pair riders with nearby vehicles efficiently. Gain access to the full system requirements, architectural diagrams, and expert design solutions with a subscription.
asked May 2026LocationGeohashCachingDesign an In-Process Pub-Sub Messaging Broker (OOD)
3/5In this object-oriented design challenge reported at Amazon, you are tasked with architecting a robust in-memory publish-subscribe messaging broker from scratch. The task focuses on managing topic subscriptions, broadcasting messages securely, and handling advanced considerations like subscriber message prioritization and multi-threaded concurrency. It is an excellent test of your architectural patterns and low-level system design capabilities. Access to the complete design guidelines and professional model solution requires a subscription.
asked May 2026OOP DesignPubsubConcurrencyDesign Robot Human-Avoidance (Open-Ended)
4/5This open-ended Amazon system design discussion focuses on equipping warehouse robotics with reliable pedestrian detection and collision avoidance capabilities. Candidates navigate critical architectural decisions, including sensor selection trade-offs, spatial data modeling for dynamic environments, and multi-tier perception-to-actuation control loops. The dialogue assesses real-time processing constraints and safety-critical machine learning integration. To read the full design guidelines and expert solution architecture, a subscription is necessary.
asked May 2026RoboticsSystem DesignSensorsML System Design: Search, Ranking, Experimentation
4/5In this comprehensive Amazon Applied Scientist interview scenario, you will navigate the end-to-end architecture of modern information retrieval, ranking, and online experimentation platforms. The discussion spans candidate generation stages, business rule overlays, offline evaluation metrics like ranking quality, and designing unbiased online A/B tests alongside generative AI safety checks. It assesses your architectural breadth, tradeoff analysis, and production ML deployment expertise. To read the full design guide, architectural frameworks, and expert walkthrough, subscribe today.
asked April 2026RetrievalRankingAB TestingApplied Scientist: Solving an Ambiguous Business Problem
4/5This Amazon Applied Scientist interview module evaluates a candidate's ability to navigate vague, under-defined business problems. The interviewer provides a deliberately sparse scenario centered around machine learning domains like ranking or brand safety, expecting the applicant to proactively clarify objectives, propose structured solutions, and reason through architectural tradeoffs. Unlocking the complete preparation guide, framework for handling ambiguity, and expert evaluation notes requires an active platform subscription.
asked April 2026Applied ScienceProblem FramingMetricsRate Limiter Design (OOD)
4/5Encountered in Amazon system design interviews, this challenge focuses on architecting a robust request throttling mechanism to protect backend services. You must evaluate incoming traffic against defined time windows and quotas while addressing concurrency, memory management, and distributed gateway synchronization. The discussion tests your understanding of scalability, sliding versus fixed time windows, and effective state expiration strategies. Gain full access to this design scenario and the comprehensive architectural solution through a subscription.
asked April 2026Rate LimitingOODToken BucketMinesweeper Game Design (OOD)
3/5In this engaging object-oriented design challenge reported at Amazon, candidates must architect a complete digital version of Minesweeper featuring dynamic board generation, recursive clearing mechanisms, and state management. The exercise tests your capability to structure clean classes, handle user actions cleanly, and optionally scale system components for persistence and multiplayer synchronization. It serves as a comprehensive test of software engineering principles and architectural foresight. Unlock the complete design guide and optimal solution walkthrough with a subscription.
asked April 2026OODFlood FillBFSCredit Card System Design (OOD)
4/5This Amazon system design exercise explores the object-oriented architecture behind a modern credit card platform, covering account creation, authorization logic, and billing cycles. Participants must define robust class relationships while handling crucial business constraints like credit limits and interest accumulation. Reviewing the complete design framework and expert solution requires a subscription.
asked April 2026ConcurrencyMoney MathOODDistributed LLM Training Data Pipeline
5/5This advanced Amazon system design challenge focuses on orchestrating a massive, distributed data ingestion and preprocessing pipeline for large language models. Candidates must architect robust mechanisms for high-throughput extraction, deduplication at scale, and cleaning unstructured text while maintaining determinism and observability. Tackling petabyte-level challenges requires deep expertise in modern cloud architectures and data engineering best practices. Unlock the complete architectural breakdown and expert-crafted reference design by subscribing today.
asked March 2026Data PipelineDedupMinhash LshDesign a File-Sharing Permission Control System
4/5In this classic system design question featured by Amazon, you are tasked with architecting a robust file-sharing permission control platform. The evaluation focuses on your capability to handle read-heavy traffic patterns, define clear consistency models for access grants and revocations, and manage hierarchical folder permissions efficiently. Preparing for this architecture discussion will improve your distributed systems expertise. Unlock the complete system design guide, trade-off analysis, and expert solution with a paid subscription.
asked March 2026System DesignAclAuthorization
Recent Amazon interview experiences
Full loops shared by candidates, every round included.
amazon robotics interview
I found a lot of the interview posts here pretty helpful when I was prepping, so figured I'd share mine too. There doesn't seem to be that much info out there about Amazon Robotics. The process was two rounds, both a mix of behavioral questions and coding. Definitely don't underestimate the Leadership Principles. One of my rounds was pretty behavioral-heavy, so I'd recommend having a few good stories that you can adapt to different LPs instead of trying to memorize a separate answer for every single one. I also got some questions around how I use AI tools in my work/projects, so that's probably worth thinking about too.
Amazon AI-team phone — a GRPO deep-dive: parallelism, node comms, reward design (pass)
A referral phone screen for an Amazon AI team — almost entirely an ML deep-dive, and they went deep on recent RL-for-LLM work rather than any coding. Passed. Heads up: every Amazon round carries a behavioral chunk too.
Amazon in-person onsite — LP rounds + an OOD, genuinely pleasant
In-person onsite and, refreshingly, it was a good experience — food, coffee, decent energy, and no dreaded bar-raiser "dog" round for me. Sharing mostly because the in-person format made a real difference vs. virtual.
Amazon SDE3 onsite — LC445 variant + a nearest-machine vending LLD (fail)
SDE3 loop, didn't make it through. The phone was an add-two-numbers variant, and the low-level design was a genuinely fun one about auto-assigning the nearest stocked machine to a user.
Amazon Applied Scientist — science depth + a manager-tree coding, then a 1-year freeze (fail)
CS PhD, 5 YOE, coming from a Data Scientist/MLE role at a traditional midwest company. Two OA-style rounds and then a one-year HR freeze after the reject, which I'm still salty about. R1 was science depth; R2 a coding problem I ran out of time on.
Amazon system design interview FAQ
- What system design questions does Amazon ask?
- 16 reported system design questions, most often on System Design, Scaling, Caching, Concurrency, OOD.
- How hard is the Amazon system design interview?
- The reported system design questions average 3.7 out of 5: 6 at 3/5, 9 at 4/5, 1 at 5/5.
- Are these Amazon system design questions recent?
- The most recent report is from October 2026, and 16 were reported within the last twelve months. Dates come from the interview reports themselves.