Build the ad matching engine that finds relevant Sponsored Products ads in milliseconds, at billions of requests a day

This SDE role sits on the Sponsored Sourcing Delivery team inside Amazon Ads, owning the Ads Searching, Selection, and Ads Matching systems for Sponsored Products. You'll design and operate high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems at the intersection of search, information retrieval, NLP, and deep learning, with a strict SLA bar and a mandate to mentor junior engineers.

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Likely format

Amazon SDE loop: online assessment, phone screen, then onsite/virtual loop of behavioral (Leadership Principles) + coding/system design rounds, with a bar raiser

What this interview tests

Low-latency, high-throughput distributed system design
Information retrieval / search architecture for ad matching
NLP and deep learning applied to relevance/matching at scale
SLA-driven production troubleshooting
Mentoring junior engineers

Common question themes

Design a system that matches ads to search queries under a strict latency budget

How would you scale an ads-matching index to handle billions of daily requests

Walk through debugging a sudden SLA violation in a production ad-serving pipeline

How have you applied ML/NLP techniques to improve retrieval relevance

Tell me about a time you mentored a junior engineer through a hard technical problem

How candidates describe it

Real Software Development Engineer interview stories — retold from candidates' public write-ups, with sources.

Amazon · SDE I (New Grad, MS CS)Offer

Amazon SDE 1 new grad loop: three online assessments, three interviews, offer in five days

A master's new grad went through Amazon's full three-part online assessment and three 45-minute virtual interviews. Every round opened with Leadership Principles questions before the coding began, and the offer landed within five business days.

Interviewed October 2019 · Seattle, WA, US

Amazon · SDE I (New Grad)Offer

Amazon SDE 1 new grad interview: one OA, four back-to-back onsite rounds, offer

A fresher found the posting through a LinkedIn connection, cleared the OA within a week of applying, and faced a six-hour virtual onsite: four one-hour rounds where every behavioral answer drew three to four follow-up questions.

Interviewed January 2021 · Seattle, WA, US

Amazon · SDE INo offer

Amazon SDE I Interview Experience: Global Selling Team, 2022

A LinkedIn referral bypassed Amazon's usual online assessment for this SDE I candidate, who then worked through a telephonic DSA screen and two technical rounds pairing coding problems with Amazon Leadership Principles questions before receiving no further response.

Interviewed March 2022 · Not specified

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