Amazon system design interview prep
Ownership, operational excellence and customer obsession.
Hiring processes vary by role, level, team and year. This is a general outline compiled from publicly shared candidate reports and company career pages, not insider information. The practice prompts are exercises in each company's product domain, not actual interview questions.
Interview process
- 1
Online assessment
Often coding and a work-style assessment for engineering roles.
- 2
Phone / video screen
Coding or design discussion plus Leadership Principles questions.
- 3
Interview loop
Several back-to-back interviews. Each commonly includes behavioural questions tied to the Leadership Principles, plus coding and system design depending on level.
- 4
Debrief
Interviewers decide together, with a designated bar-raiser in many loops.
What they tend to emphasise
Practice prompts
- Design an e-commerce shopping cart that never loses items.
- Design an order tracking and notification system.
- Design a product catalogue with search and recommendations.
- Design a package delivery routing and tracking platform.
- Design a rate-limited public API with usage billing.
Resources
- Case Studies
Amazon Dynamo: Highly Available Key-Value Store
Werner Vogels' write-up of the design that inspired DynamoDB, Cassandra and Riak.
AdvancedRead hereReplicationCAP TheoremBy Werner Vogels · Amazon
- Blogs
Amazon Builders' Library
How Amazon builds reliable systems: timeouts, retries, backoff, load shedding.
AdvancedDistributed SystemsRate LimitingBy Amazon Engineers · Amazon Web Services
- Documentation
AWS Well-Architected Framework
Pillars and best practices for building secure, reliable and efficient cloud systems.
IntermediateDistributed SystemsMicroservicesBy AWS · Amazon Web Services
- Books
Concurrent and Distributed Systems (Cambridge lecture notes)
Eight lectures on time, broadcast, replication, consensus and transactions, with notes, slides and video. Free from the author under CC BY-SA.
IntermediateFree from the authorDistributed SystemsConsistency ModelsBy Martin Kleppmann · University of Cambridge
- Books
Designing Event-Driven Systems
Event sourcing, CQRS and using event streams as the source of truth, with Kafka. A free ebook from the author and Confluent.
IntermediateFree from the authorEvent Driven ArchitectureKafkaBy Ben Stopford · Confluent
- Books
Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit
A short, readable tour of time, consistency and replication in distributed systems, free to read online from the author.
BeginnerFree from the authorDistributed SystemsReplicationBy Mikito Takada · mixu.net
Learning paths & practice
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