Top Amazon System Design Interview Questions for 2025 (with Answers & Tips)

Amazon system design interview questions are a crucial part of the Amazon interview process, especially for technical and senior engineering roles. These questions test how well you can design scalable, reliable, and distributed systems that meet real-world challenges.

Preparing for these interviews isn’t just about technical knowledge—it’s also about showing clear communication, structured problem-solving, and alignment with Amazon’s leadership principles.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the Amazon system design interview process, proven preparation frameworks, and sample questions to help you succeed.

Amazon System Design Interview Process

The Amazon system design interview questions are typically asked later in the interview process. If you pass the phone screening round, you’ll be invited for a video interview. This interview lasts for about 45 to 60 minutes¹. It will involve a hiring manager or a peer of the same level as your role.

Let’s look at the main stages of the Amazon technical interview:

• The Recruiter Screen: In this round, you’re asked some basic questions about your profile and experience. If your qualifications and skills meet the demands of the role, you’re invited to the technical phone screen interview.
• The Technical Screen: In this round, you’re asked 1-2 Amazon coding interview questions. This is a remote round that lasts about 30-45 minutes. You’re asked to write code on a shared doc or a remote interviewing tool.
• The Loop Interview: Amazon’s on-site interview is known as the Loop. The Loop has 3-5 rounds of interviews – 1-2 coding rounds, 1-2 design rounds, a leadership round (based on Amazon’s leadership principles), and a Bar-raiser round. It is in the on-site design round that you’re asked Amazon systems design interview questions.

Also read: Amazon Interview Process Prep Guide

Amazon System Design Interview Questions and Answers

If you have attempted a coding interview in the past, you must be aware that system design or software design problems are an important part of technical interviews. Practicing these questions is key to cracking tech interviews, especially if you’re gunning for senior positions.

Here are a few commonly asked Amazon system design interview questions and the approach you should take to solve them:

Q1. Design a URL shortening service

This is one of the most common Amazon system design interview questions involving shortening URLs for ease of sharing and use. While designing the URL shortening service, your ideal solution should:

• Create a unique URL ID while shortening a URL
• Handle redirects
• Delete expired URLs
• Have an upper limit on the number of characters for the shortened URL

Q2. How do you design a traffic control system?

This Amazon system design interview question has been popular for a while now. While answering this question, your ideal solution should:

• Consider all phase transitions (From red to green, red to orange to green, and so on)
• Be clear on the conditions in which a certain transition will take place
• Consider pedestrian crossing requirements
• Determine cycle length
• Determine clearance time
• Apportion green light time appropriately

The traffic control system’s behavior will depend on the state of the traffic control system. Explain all your considerations when stating your solution and reasons for trade-offs made, if any.

Q3. How would you design a search typeahead?

This is another Amazon systems design interview question that frequently features in Amazon systems design interviews. In order to answer this question, you should consider the following aspects:

• Store previous search queries in the database
• Keep the data fresh
• Find the appropriate matches to the entered string
• Handle the queries per second – to be automatically handled by the system
• Display the best matches from strings contained in the database

Q4. What Aspects Would You Consider While Designing A Web Crawler?

This is one of the most common systems design interview questions asked at Amazon interviews. While designing a web crawler, the following aspects need to be considered:

• Prioritize dynamic web pages, as these pages appear more frequently in search engine rankings
• The crawler should not be unbounded on the same domain
• Build a system that constantly tracks new web pages

Source: WhatIs

20 Amazon System Design Interview Questions for Practice

Once you’ve figured out how to answer Amazon system design interview questions, you can use these sample questions to better prepare for the interview.

1. How would you design a warehouse system for Amazon.com?
2. How would you design Amazon.com to handle 10 times more traffic than it does so it can handle 10x more traffic than today?
3. How would you design Amazon.com’s database (customers, orders, products, etc.)?
4. Design a counter system for online services.
5. Design a game of chess.
6. Design a parking garage.
7. Design an email sender that can send 100,000,000 emails. You have five machines. How could you do it efficiently?
8. Design a video streaming service.
9. Design an online bookstore.
10. Design a global file storage service or sharing service.
11. Design an API rate limiter.
12. Design a proximity server.
13. Design a type-ahead service.
14. How do you design a vending machine in Java?
15. How to design a limit order book for trading systems?
16. How do you design an elevator system?
17. How would you go about designing an e-commerce website?
18. How would you go about designing the e-commerce website using microservices? How will you handle transactions?
19. Create an autocomplete feature like word suggestions on search engines. How will you scale it to millions of users?
20. How would you design a notification system like Amazon’s order updates?

Also read: Amazon Front-End Engineer Interview Process

Tips to Crack Amazon System Design Interview Questions

As you may have noticed, the Amazon system design interview questions can be tricky. The questions are ambiguous, and you will have to deal with the unstructured nature of the discussion. However, with extra practice, you’ll be prepared to handle anything the interviewers throw at you. Here’s what you should do before and during the interview to make the best impression.

Quick Checklist To Keep Handy While Preparing for Amazon System Design Interview Questions 2025

When you are in the middle of Amazon system design interview question preparations, it is easy to lose track of all the moving parts. That’s where this checklist comes into play. Thinks of the checklist as a handy cheat sheet to keep your answers structured, clear, and complete.

☐ Clarify requirements
☐ Propose a high-level design
☐ Drill down into one component
☐ Discuss trade-offs
☐ Consider reliability and monitoring
☐ Tie to Amazon leadership principles²
☐ Summarize clearly

Conclusion

Cracking Amazon system design interview questions requires more than just memorizing common problems—it’s about mastering a repeatable framework, practicing with mock interviews, and demonstrating your ability to build scalable, customer-focused systems.

By combining strong technical knowledge with clear communication and tying your answers to Amazon’s leadership principles, you’ll stand out as someone who can think and design like an Amazon engineer. With consistent system design preparation, you’ll be ready to face even the most open-ended and challenging interview questions with confidence.

Recommended Reading: How to Crack a System Design Interview

FAQs on Amazon System Design Interview Questions

Q1. How to solve Amazon system design interview questions?

To solve Amazon systems design interview questions, you need to be thorough with the important systems design concepts. Spending at least two weeks preparing the important systems design concepts is highly recommended.

Q2. How many Amazon System Design Questions are asked at the Amazon Interview?

At the Amazon systems design interview, you’re generally asked 1-2 practical questions and a few theoretical questions.

Q3. Are Amazon System Design Interview Questions Tough to Crack?

Systems design interviews at top tech companies, including Amazon, are challenging, mostly because of the stiff competition and general difficulty associated with these interviews. The acceptance rate at FAANG+ companies is under 2%, making it even more difficult to crack these interviews.

Q4. What is the Amazon system design interview process like?

The Amazon systems design interview happens during the on-site interview, also known as the Loop. At the design interview, you’re typically asked to build an arbitrary system with a given set of parameters. Note that there’s more emphasis on systems design interviews for senior software and managerial positions.

Q5. Which concepts are to be learned for the Amazon System Design Interview?

The important concepts to prepare for the Amazon systems design interview include Scalable systems architecture, concurrency, API Modeling, online processing systems, file systems, network protocols, databases, sharding techniques, loading, and caching.

References

1. Typical duration of System Design Interview
2. Amazon Leadership Principles