Did my Amazon SDE2 onsite last Thursday. Posting while it's fresh because I couldn't find anything recent when I was prepping.
The loop was 4 rounds: 2 coding, 1 system design, 1 behavioral (LP round). All virtual, all on Chime. Interviewers were prompt-ish, one was clearly reading from a script.
System design round: Design a URL shortener. Classic, I know. But they went much deeper than the basic version. They pushed hard on: How you handle 10B shortened URLs at scale Your approach to analytics (click counts per URL, geolocation breakdowns) What happens when the redirect service goes down but the creation service stays up How you'd handle hot keys (viral links getting hammered)
I spent maybe 15 min on the high-level, then the last 30 were basically just the interviewer drilling edge cases. She knew the system design space well. Don't wing this round.
Coding rounds: One medium-ish graph problem (connected components variant) and one that was basically sliding window but they added a constraint halfway through that changed the complexity. Standard LeetCode medium territory, nothing wild.
LP round: All 14 leadership principles are fair game but they seem to cluster around Customer Obsession, Dive Deep, and Ownership for SDE2. I got "tell me about a time you disagreed with your manager" twice across different interviewers, so expect overlaps.
Timeline note: I finished the loop Thursday, recruiter said 5 business days for a decision. Actually heard back in 3. Either good or bad sign, not sure.
Level was SDE2 (L5 equivalent). NYC-based role, hybrid 3 days in office.
Happy to answer questions. What are people seeing in 2026 -- is the LP round getting harder or is it just me?