Amazon Software Development Manager Interview Guide

The standard interview loop for Amazon Engineering Managers looks like:

• Recruiter Phone Screen 
• Technical Phone Screen 
• Written Exercise 
• Onsite Loop 
  System Design 
  People Management
  Operational Excellence
  Technical Program and Product Management
  Bar Raiser 
• Debrief & Hiring Decision

Amazon officially does not slot in a coding round, but if you're targeting L6, it's possible that some loops add one or even a domain specific technical round. L7 loops keep coding entirely. Regardless, you should check with your recruiter to confirm.

If you’re interviewing to be a senior SDE, please head over to our Amazon SDE interview guide.

Amazon structures its entire operational culture around its 16 core Leadership Principles (LPs). Each interviewer that you'll meet in your loop will be explicitly assigned to evaluate about two or three of these principles using a targeted star format probing.

Amazon's infamous 16 core Leadership Principles.

For EM/ SDM candidates, the most heavily probed LPs are Ownership, Bias for Action, Dive Deep, Hire and Develop the Best, Earn Trust, and Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit

This is a 30-60 minute conversation with a recruiter that's aimed at getting a read on your level. They'll walk through your background, like your org size and how many engineers reported to you. 

After speaking to a couple of candidates who recently went through the recruiter screen, the themes that recruiters tried to cover were:

• Whether your scope matches the level you’re gunning for
• If you can get into architecture details and ownership without passing it off onto your engineers
• Why you're leaving your current job
• Some early signal on Ownership and Hire and Develop the Best (LPs)

Since this is a conversation, the recruiter will be more than happy to answer a couple of questions. Use this time to ask some very important questions:

•  what level you're up for and 
• if your loop includes a coding round.

This video covers what kinds of questions you’ll face and covers strategies you can use for answering them. It also provides insight into Amazon's culture and its LPs and what they mean for you.

This is a 60 minute screen with a senior leader on the team usually with no live coding expected of you. Amazon has officially published that the hour will roughly split down the middle:

• LPs for the first half
• System Design on a new or existing system for the rest

But obviously this is not gospel, because we've heard from a couple of candidates that the entire hour was spent purely on LPs with no design at all.

Dave Anderson, a former Amazon Tech Director and GM, says the screen is almost always conducted remotely so you have the time to prepare. Think of it as a litmus test to check if you have the chops to pass the entire loop that's to follow.

Expect questions like:

• How do you decide what your team is going to work on in the next quarter?
• Walk me through a system you've owned previously. Are there any parts of it that you would redesign?

We suggest that you have a 30 second version and a 3 minute version of every story ready. Since the screen’s bar is a little lower and also moves much faster, the interviewer will probably cut in a couple times to steer you toward what signal/story they’re looking for. With two versions, you won't lose sight of the important points even if you’re rushing.

About 2 days before you begin your onsite loop, you’ll be asked to submit a written assessment that’s a 2-4 page “business narrative”. You’ll have a choice between two prompts. 

Typically, the prompt will ask you to narrate a past achievement asking you to go into details like what the setup was, your challenge specifically, how you went about solving it and what outcomes you can put numbers to (exactly like the STAR framework)

You’ll be expected to submit a plain text doc with no embedded charts or images because the whole assignment plans to evaluate how well you structure your complex engineering logic in writing. This is exactly how Amazon works internally, where teams write docs instead of building slide decks to pitch their decisions.

Recently, candidates have reported prompts like:

• What's the most innovative piece of work you've done?
• Has a project you’ve owned ever failed or missed expectations? What did you do?

Both your HM and the bar raiser, (amongst others probably), are going to read this. So this could count as a pass/fail step in the interview, but it doesn't necessarily have a numeric score. Assume that your interviewers for the onsite have read this and will probably ask questions about it.

Like with any written doc, you'll want to prioritize scannability. Reach for bullets wherever you can and don't ramble. Have copious evidence that you’ve actually put in the work and don't leave the overall/obvious question hanging. Amazon constantly hires senior leaders whose native language isn't English so they’re not going to nitpick grammar or writing style. 

You’ll typically face 5 interviews, 55 minutes each, usually run virtually over Chime, often spread across two days. 

1. System Design

You’ll face a vague open-ended prompt that's designed to test how you handle ambiguity under pressure, especially when the interviewer introduces constraints or new data after you’ve made some progress on their initial prompt. The interviewer is typically a PE or Senior SDM. 

How much of the 55 minutes is spent purely on design is a detail that varies wildly. Averaging a bunch of candidate reports, expect 30 minutes to be spent on the design prompt and about 20 minutes for behavioral questions around the LPs.

The technical portion will evaluate your engineering judgment with some special attention on cost benefit trade-offs. Your interviewers will also be evaluating your operational thinking and leadership perspective.

Recently, Prepfully candidates faced prompts like:

• Build a Real-Time Entitlement Verification System for Prime Video.
• How would you build the software behind an Amazon pickup-locker location?
• Walk me through the architecture of a system your team owned. What are its limits?

Since the system design format is standardized across the industry, we covered all of it in our System Design guide if you’re looking to brush up on the format or looking for tips.

2. People Management

The interviewer in this round will focus pretty hard on your mechanisms to lead a team. You’ll have to rely on stellar evidence of the processes you've built to improve hiring for your team or their performance. You’ll face a mix of 4-6 STAR format questions. Some of them can be more intense, with some digging and follow ups.

The themes of the questions you’ll face mostly touch upon:

• how you develop careers and handle underperformers 
• what you do for your strongest performers
• how your recruiting runs

You’ll understand their line of questions or even who the ideal candidate would be when you have a glimpse of their daily life:

Expect questions like:

• Give me an example of a hiring mistake you made. 
• What do you do if two senior engineers on your team strongly disagree on something?
• Have you ever coached a mid-level engineer to earn a promotion? 

When you sit down to make a story bank for Amazon, we suggest that you take the classic STAR framework and build it out into STAR+ (Situation, Task, Action, Result + the X-Factor: Learning). The X-Factor at the end, Learning, is your chance to demonstrate the intellectual humility their LPs are obsessed with. Show them you can reflect on events in your career for a personal takeaway that can change you for the better.

3. Operational Excellence

Like the name of the round suggests, the interviewer will focus on details of incident response or what you've done to turn failures into fixes that stick in your past. It’s a little more conversational and mostly focuses on how you’d improve the operations of a system you own. 

A lot of Prepfully candidates came back to us saying interviewers consistently kept circling back to what they had personally done to prove they weren’t just passive when the sirens were going off.

They can get the conversation started with questions like:

• What was your most severe outage like? What did you do to handle it?
• What is the experience your engineers have had when they're on-call? Do you think your structure is sustainable?

Read Amazon's Correction of Error (COE) format before you go in. It's the template their managers are asked to use so it’ll give you the exact context your methods will be evaluated against.

4. Technical Program and Product Management

The interviewer in this round will examine how well you work across cross-org boundaries and how you deliver on initiatives. Interviewers will ask you behavioral questions to understand your delivery framework and how well it works. It’s important that it accounts for all the friction that could come from working with multiple teams from different crafts. It really helps to show that you can influence decisions without leaning on authority and rank.

The product management portion will be concerned with your roadmap ownership, more specifically, the ones you inherited.

Expect questions to be rooted in crisis management:

• What’s your #1 tactic to keep a partner team accountable about their deliverables?
• What's the most complex cross-team project that you've led?
• Tell me about a program that didn't go so well. How did that affect how you planned the next one?

5. Bar Raiser

One of your 5 interviewers will be a Bar Raiser. They’re always pulled from outside the team that’s hiring to be completely neutral. Their goal is to see if you would “perform better than roughly half the people already in that role at that level”, in Amazon’s words.

They usually don’t care for level topics like project summaries and will get into the details of your technical choices immediately. Remember, they’ve already had the chance to go over your written assignment and already have a faint idea of how you handle projects. Candidates usually face 3-4 questions and say the follow ups are quite relentless.

The Bar Raiser holds a veto on your hiring decision in the debrief though some of them have said they've never really had to use it.

For SDMs, they’ll usually go for questions like these:

• Tell me about a time you had to flat-out disagree with a stakeholder. What did you say to them?
• Has your team ever inherited a complex project that was frustrating? What did you do to help simplify?
• Did you ever hire engineers because you realized your current team was not equipped enough? What were you looking for?

Amazon grades candidates by rating specific leadership principles as either a Strength (ST), Satisfies (SA), Development Needed (DN), or No Evidence (NE). Interviewers use these ratings to then cast a final vote to hire you on a scale of Strongly Inclined > Inclined > Not Inclined > Strongly Not Inclined.

Verified 2026 median total compensation ranges for Amazon Engineering Manager/ SDM roles, based on self-reported offers on Levels.fyi as of mid-2026:

• L6 SDM: $473,000
• L7 Sr. SDM: $595,000

View the latest compensation for Amazon SDMs on Levels.fyi.