Amazon SDE2 Interview Guide
Published July 22, 2026 · Updated July 22, 2026
Evidence-backed preparation playbook for Amazon SDE2 interviews. 267 reported questions, top topics, difficulty breakdown, and a free assessment.
3-6 years
Most reported exp
Rounds reported
Screening 87qTechnical 86qScenario 44qSystem Design 28qHR 22q
Topics most frequently reported
✓DevOps / Kubernetes
8 questions · 3%
✓DSA / Trees
7 questions · 3%
✓DSA / Dynamic Programming
7 questions · 3%
·React / Performance
6 questions · 2%
·DSA / Arrays
5 questions · 2%
·Java / Concurrency
5 questions · 2%
Free · 10 minutes
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Top Questions — Ranked by Community Votes
These 6 questions appeared most in Amazon SDE2 reports. Master these first.
Amazon
Hard
System Design round
Distributed SystemsSystem DesignAWS
Design a distributed rate limiter that can handle 10M requests per second across multiple data centers. Discuss consistency tradeoffs, the choice between token bucket vs leaky bucket, and how you would handle clock skew across regions.
↑ 99 upvotes · 89 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Hard
Screening round
4-8 years
Explain the CAP theorem with a real database example for each combination. Which pair does a standard RDBMS choose?
↑ 84 upvotes · 42 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Medium
Screening round
3-6 years
Explain how Prometheus and Grafana work together for monitoring. What are the key metrics you'd track for a Node.js API?
↑ 84 upvotes · 52 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Hard
System Design round
4-8 years
How would you implement blue-green deployment with database migrations?
↑ 84 upvotes · 12 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Hard
Scenario round
4-8 years
Your PostgreSQL database has a table with 200 million records. A nightly batch job runs UPDATE on 5 million rows. The next morning, queries that were taking 50ms now take 8 seconds. What happened and how do you fix it?
↑ 83 upvotes · 51 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Medium
Technical round
2-4 years
Given an array of intervals, merge all overlapping intervals. Return the minimum number of intervals after merging. Example: [[1,3],[2,6],[8,10],[15,18]] → [[1,6],[8,10],[15,18]]
↑ 83 upvotes · 31 engineers asked this · SDE2
See all 267 questions →
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Frequently asked questions
How hard is the Amazon SDE2 interview?
Mostly Hard difficulty based on 267 reported questions. Most questions cover DevOps / Kubernetes, DSA / Trees, DSA / Dynamic Programming.
What topics does Amazon ask SDE2s?
Top reported topics: DevOps / Kubernetes (8 questions), DSA / Trees (7 questions), DSA / Dynamic Programming (7 questions), React / Performance (6 questions), DSA / Arrays (5 questions).
How many rounds does Amazon have for SDE2?
Reported rounds: Technical, System Design, HR, Scenario, Screening.
What experience level does Amazon hire SDE2s at?
Most reported: 3-6 years and 4-7 years.