SDE, AWS OpenSearch Service — scale a search service managing thousands of domains

Design, develop, and support the AWS OpenSearch Service that manages thousands of customer search domains, with a focus on scalability, performance, service robustness, and cost tradeoffs in a highly virtualized, elastic cloud environment. Requires 3+ years of professional software development plus 2+ years of design/architecture experience and 3+ years working with big-data technologies (Hadoop, Spark, Lucene/SOLR, or Storm/Samza). This is Bengaluru-based AWS Utility Computing org work with 24x7 operational ownership.

Practice this interview

Free · a live voice mock calibrated to this exact role

Start the mock interview

What this interview tests

Distributed search service design at multi-tenant cloud scale
Scalability, robustness, and cost tradeoffs in elastic/virtualized environments
Big-data technology experience (Hadoop, Spark, Lucene/SOLR, Storm/Samza)
Production operations and 24x7 service ownership
Applying quantitative/mathematical modeling to system design decisions

Common question themes

Design a search service that must scale to thousands of tenant domains

Describe a production incident in a distributed system and how you resolved it

How you used a big-data framework (Spark/Hadoop/Lucene) to solve a real problem

Reasoning about cost vs performance tradeoffs in a cloud-elastic system

How you'd set technical vision or mentor other engineers on the team

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

View the original posting

All Amazon Software Development Engineer interviews

All Amazon interviews