Amazon Interview Process 2026: OA, Loop, and Bar Raiser

The Amazon technical interview process in 2026 includes an online assessment (mostly for SDE I and new grads), a technical phone screen, and a final loop of four to five one-hour interviews. Every round mixes technical questions with Leadership Principles questions, and one interviewer is a Bar Raiser from outside the team who can veto the hire. Amazon hires SDE I (L4) through Principal (L7) with this format, and most candidates finish in four to eight weeks.

Key Takeaways

• Amazon weights behavior as heavily as code. Leadership Principles come up in every round, so expect to tell 8-12 different stories during a loop.
• The Bar Raiser is an outside interviewer with veto power whose job is to keep the hiring bar consistent across Amazon.
• The online assessment includes coding, a work simulation, and a work style survey. All three count.
• Coding difficulty is mostly LeetCode medium. System design appears from SDE II (L5) and is central at SDE III (L6) and above.
• Amazon RSUs vest on a back-loaded 5/15/40/40 schedule, with sign-on bonuses covering the first two years.
• Amazon has told candidates that using generative AI during interviews without permission may lead to disqualification.

What Does the Amazon Interview Process Look Like in 2026?

Amazon hires at a very large scale, so its process is highly standardized. Here is the pipeline for a typical software development engineer role.

Stage 1: The Online Assessment

The Amazon online assessment (OA) is the first filter for most SDE I, new grad, and intern candidates. It usually runs on HackerRank in a proctored environment and has three parts.

Coding Section

You get two coding problems in roughly 70 to 90 minutes. Problems are typically LeetCode medium and often have an Amazon-flavored story, such as warehouse logistics, delivery routes, or inventory counts. Your code runs against hidden test cases, and passing all of them matters, so test edge cases before you submit.

Common OA topics:

• Arrays and hash maps
• Sorting and greedy algorithms
• Heaps and priority queues
• BFS on grids
• Sliding window and prefix sums

Work Simulation

The work simulation puts you in a realistic SDE scenario, such as an inbox of messages from teammates and managers, and asks you to pick or rank responses. It checks judgment: Do you prioritize the customer, take ownership, and dive into data before deciding? It takes roughly 20-30 minutes.

Work Style Survey

The work style survey is a set of statements where you indicate how much each one describes you. It maps directly to Leadership Principles. Answer honestly but consistently. Contradictory answers look worse than any single answer.

Because the OA is proctored on HackerRank, tab switches, paste events, and code similarity are all logged. Our article on whether HackerRank detects AI explains what the platform monitors.

Stage 2: The Technical Phone Screen

Experienced candidates usually start here. The phone screen is a 45 to 60-minute video interview with an Amazon engineer, often using Amazon's own live coding tool or a shared editor. A typical split:

• 10-15 minutes of Leadership Principles questions
• 30-40 minutes on one or two coding problems
• 5 minutes for your questions

Even here, the behavioral portion is scored. Have your stories ready from the first call.

Stage 3: The Final Loop

The final loop is four to five interviews of about an hour each, usually virtual and scheduled back to back over one day. Each interviewer is assigned specific Leadership Principles and a technical focus, so together they cover the full rubric.

A typical SDE II loop looks like this:

Each round usually opens with 15-25 minutes of Leadership Principles questions and spends the rest on the technical problem. Some rounds, especially the Bar Raiser's, can be almost entirely behavioral.

Coding Rounds

Amazon coding questions are mostly LeetCode medium. Compared with Google, they are more practical and less tricky. Amazon cares about working code, clear structure, and handling edge cases. Common themes:

• Graphs and BFS/DFS (dependency resolution, shortest delivery path)
• Trees and tries (autocomplete, hierarchy problems)
• Heaps (top-K products, merging sorted streams)
• Hash maps and sliding windows
• Object-oriented design, such as designing a parking lot, a locker system, or a file system API

The object-oriented design (low-level design) question is more common at Amazon than at Google or Meta. Practice modeling classes, interfaces, and extensibility. Our coding interview patterns cheat sheet covers the algorithmic side.

System Design Round

System design appears for SDE II and is central for SDE III and Principal. Prompts often draw on Amazon's own domain:

• Design an order processing system
• Design a product recommendation service
• Design a distributed job scheduler
• Design a URL shortener or rate limiter
• Design a notification service for delivery updates

Amazon interviewers like explicit discussion of operational concerns: monitoring, alarms, failure recovery, and cost. Familiarity with AWS building blocks (S3, DynamoDB, SQS, Lambda, Kinesis) helps, but explaining trade-offs matters more than naming services. See our system design interview guide for a full framework.

What Is a Bar Raiser at Amazon?

A Bar Raiser is an experienced Amazon employee, specially trained and certified, who joins your loop from outside the hiring team. The program exists to keep each new hire "better than 50% of current employees" in that role and to stop teams from lowering the bar when they are under pressure to fill seats.

What makes the Bar Raiser different:

• Independence. They are not on the hiring team and do not benefit from filling the role.
• Depth on Leadership Principles. They tend to ask layered follow-ups: What exactly did you do? What data did you use? What would you change?
• Debrief leadership. They run the post-loop debrief, where every interviewer shares feedback before seeing the others' votes.
• Veto power. A Bar Raiser can block a hire even if the hiring manager supports it.

You usually will not be told which interviewer is the Bar Raiser. Treat every round as if it could be.

How Much Do Leadership Principles Matter?

Amazon's 16 Leadership Principles are the core of the evaluation, not a side component. They are:

1. Customer Obsession
2. Ownership
3. Invent and Simplify
4. Are Right, A Lot
5. Learn and Be Curious
6. Hire and Develop the Best
7. Insist on the Highest Standards
8. Think Big
9. Bias for Action
10. Frugality
11. Earn Trust
12. Dive Deep
13. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
14. Deliver Results
15. Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
16. Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

A practical way to think about the weighting: a strong coding performance with weak LP answers usually fails, and a strong LP performance with acceptable coding often passes. For SDE III and Principal candidates, LP answers also decide whether your scope matches the level.

Interviewers expect STAR-format answers with personal ownership, real data, and clear results. They will ask follow-ups until they hit the details, so invented or inflated stories tend to fall apart. For a full question bank with sample answers mapped to each principle, see our guide to Amazon Leadership Principles interview questions. The general top 50 behavioral questions list is also useful.

How to build your story bank:

• Write 10-15 stories from your last three to five years.
• Map each story to two or three principles.
• Include at least one failure story, one disagreement story, and one story where you went beyond your role.
• Put numbers in every story: latency reduced, tickets cut, dollars saved, customers affected.
• Avoid reusing the same story across rounds where possible. Interviewers compare notes.

Amazon's Policy on AI Use in Interviews

In 2025 Amazon issued guidance telling candidates not to use generative AI tools during interviews unless explicitly permitted, and warned that doing so may result in disqualification. Reports on the internal recruiter guidelines said interviewers are trained to look for signals such as typing while questions are being asked, reading answers instead of responding naturally, and eyes moving off screen.

Online assessments are proctored as well, and Amazon, like Google, has moved some interviews back to in-person settings for certain roles. For more on what interviewers can and cannot see, read can interviewers tell if you use ChatGPT.

Amazon SDE Levels and Compensation (L4-L7)

Amazon's engineering levels start at L4 for most software engineering hires. The figures below are approximate US totals based on public self-reported data and depend on location and Amazon's stock price.

How Amazon RSU Vesting Works

Amazon compensation is built around a target total compensation figure for each year, made up of base salary, cash sign-on bonuses, and RSUs. Amazon does not usually pay a separate annual cash performance bonus for engineers.

The RSU schedule has historically been back-loaded:

The sign-on bonuses are sized to roughly even out total comp in years one and two. They are typically prorated and must be repaid if you leave early. Refresher grants usually also vest on a back-loaded schedule. Reports in 2025 suggested Amazon was considering changes to vesting for some senior or top-rated employees, so read your offer letter carefully. For negotiation tactics, see our salary negotiation guide.

How Long Does the Amazon Interview Process Take?

Amazon is generally faster than Google. A typical timeline:

1. Week 1: Recruiter contact and OA invitation
2. Weeks 1-2: OA completion (usually within a 5 to 7-day window)
3. Weeks 2-4: Phone screen, if applicable
4. Weeks 3-6: Final loop
5. Within about a week of the loop: Debrief and decision
6. Weeks 5-8: Offer and negotiation

New grad hiring can move faster, with the OA leading straight to a final loop. See how long FAANG interviews take for benchmarks across companies.

How Should You Prepare for the Amazon Interview?

A balanced six to eight-week plan:

• Weeks 1-4: coding. 100-150 LeetCode mediums focused on graphs, trees, heaps, and hash maps. Add three or four object-oriented design problems.
• Weeks 1-6: Leadership Principles. Draft and rehearse your 10-15 stories alongside coding prep, not after it.
• Weeks 3-6: system design (SDE II+). Six to ten mock design sessions with attention to operations and failure handling.
• Weeks 6-8: full mock loops. Practice hour-long sessions that switch from LP questions to coding, the way the real loop does.

If you are early in your career, our new grad software engineer interview guide covers OA-heavy pipelines in more depth. If you are comparing companies, the Google and Meta guides show how differently the other two weight coding and behavior.

Common Reasons Candidates Fail the Amazon Loop

• Vague "we" stories. Bar Raisers need to hear what you personally did.
• One story for everything. Using the same project in every round signals limited experience.
• No data. Amazon's culture runs on metrics, and answers without numbers sound weak.
• Ignoring edge cases in code. Practical correctness matters more than clever tricks.
• Skipping operations in design. Not mentioning monitoring, alarms, and failure recovery is a red flag for SDE II and above.