Own Tier-1 ad-eligibility services for Amazon's self-service advertisers, serving small-and-medium businesses globally

This SDE role on the ad-serving team within Sponsored Products and Brands focuses on the self-service advertising org that serves the 80% of advertisers who are small/medium businesses. You'll design and own Tier-1 services determining ad-serving eligibility, working with EC2, Fargate, Lambda, SQS, ElastiCache, and S3, with explicit expectations around GenAI proficiency in the ad-serving pipeline.

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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

Tier-1 ad-eligibility service design at global scale
AWS primitives: EC2, Fargate, Lambda, SQS, ElastiCache, S3
State management, GC tuning, and memory optimization for latency
GenAI-native development workflow
Full software lifecycle ownership (design through production ops)

Common question themes

Design a service that determines ad eligibility with high availability across 20+ countries

How would you architect a solution using SQS, Lambda, and ElastiCache together for this workload

Tell me about a time you tuned GC or optimized memory for a latency-sensitive service

How have you used GenAI tools natively in a production pipeline, not just for personal productivity

Walk through owning a service end-to-end from design through incident response

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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