Amazon
Mid
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.
Step into this interview
Free · a live voice mock calibrated to this exact role
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
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