Build agentic diagnostics and analytics services that explain catalog changes across billions of Amazon products

Amazon's Catalog Diagnostics and Analytics (CDA) team, part of Selection and Catalog Systems, owns one of Amazon Retail's largest data lakes and is building GenAI/agentic solutions to make catalog changes transparent and explainable at billion-product, 100K-TPS scale. This SDE role sits at the intersection of production-grade transactional systems, large-scale information retrieval, and emerging agentic architectures — full ownership from design through deployment.

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Likely format

Typical Amazon SDE loop: online assessment/phone screen, then onsite/virtual loop with coding, system design, and Leadership Principles behavioral rounds including a bar raiser.

What this interview tests

Agentic system design for production-grade accuracy and reliability at scale
Data provenance / audit-trail design for explainability
Large-scale distributed systems fundamentals (OOD, multi-threaded, multi-tiered)
Working with petabyte-scale multimodal data pipelines
GenAI/LLM integration practices: prompt engineering, RAG, agentic architectures

Common question themes

Design a system for catalog change diagnostics with full data traceability

How would you build an evaluation/feedback loop to keep an agentic system production-ready

Object-oriented design and distributed systems coding round

Handling a system processing at 100K TPS — what fails first and how do you mitigate it

Amazon Leadership Principles behavioral interview (bar-raiser round)

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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