Went through the full Amazon software engineer interview process last fall for an L5 SDE II role in Seattle. Sharing because I had to piece this together from a dozen posts and they were all slightly wrong.
Here's the actual sequence:
Online Assessment (OA) Two coding problems, 90 minutes. In 2025-2026 they've been using a custom platform, not HackerRank. Problems lean graph or DP, not the string manipulation stuff you see on LeetCode easy. The second problem is harder. Time management is real.
Phone Screen (45-60 min) One coding problem, usually medium difficulty. Graph BFS, sliding window, something where brute force gets you half credit at best. The engineer will also ask one or two Leadership Principle questions at the end. Don't treat those as filler. They're not.
Virtual Onsite (4-5 rounds, same-day or spread over two days) This is where it differs from most people's descriptions: Two coding rounds: medium to hard LeetCode equivalent. They do NOT want you to just get the answer, they want to hear you think out loud and catch your own edge cases. One system design round (L5+): See below. Two bar raiser behavioral rounds: Every round has some LP questions, but at least one full round is almost entirely behavioral. The bar raiser is anonymous; you won't know who it is.
There's no separate "culture fit" round. The behavioral component is baked into every interview.
Debrief and offer timeline Recruiter said 1-2 weeks. Mine was 9 business days. Got a verbal first, written package 3 days later.
A few things that bit me the first time I interviewed there (yes, first time, I bombed it): Not having specific LP stories memorized. Vague answers die here. Writing code without narrating. Silence is bad. Optimizing prematurely before confirming correctness.
Happy to answer specifics if you've got a loop coming up.