Amazon AWS Interview Questions 2026
Published July 22, 2026 · Updated July 22, 2026
5 real AWS interview questions asked at Amazon. Upvoted by engineers who cleared the loop. Covers System Design, Technical rounds.
5 questions
239 engineers asked
315 upvotes
Company: Amazon
Technology: AWS
All AWS Questions Asked at Amazon
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
System Design round
Distributed SystemsKafkaAWS
Design Amazon's recommendation engine (customers who bought X also bought Y).
Cover: collaborative filtering vs content-based, item-item similarity at scale, real-time vs batch computation, and how you handle the cold-start problem for new products.
↑ 58 upvotes · 38 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Medium
Technical round
AWSDynamoDBJava
Explain Amazon's DynamoDB single-table design pattern.
Why do you put multiple entity types in one table? Walk through a real example with access patterns, partition key / sort key design, and GSI usage.
↑ 47 upvotes · 28 engineers asked this · SDE2
Amazon
Medium
Technical round
3–5 YearsAWS
What is the difference between an S3 bucket policy, IAM policy, and S3 ACL? Which takes precedence?
↑ 87 upvotes · 68 engineers asked this · Cloud Architect
Amazon
Medium
Technical round
2-5 yearsAWS
What is Lambda cold start and why does it happen? Name two concrete techniques to reduce its impact on a latency-sensitive API.
↑ 24 upvotes · 16 engineers asked this · SDE2
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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.
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.
Design Amazon's recommendation engine (customers who bought X also bought Y).
Design Amazon's recommendation engine (customers who bought X also bought Y).
Cover: collaborative filtering vs content-based, item-item similarity at scale, real-time vs batch computation, and how you handle the cold-start problem for new products.
Explain Amazon's DynamoDB single-table design pattern.
Explain Amazon's DynamoDB single-table design pattern.
Why do you put multiple entity types in one table? Walk through a real example with access patterns, partition key / sort key design, and GSI usage.
What is the difference between an S3 bucket policy, IAM policy, and S3 ACL? Which takes precedence?
What is the difference between an S3 bucket policy, IAM policy, and S3 ACL? Which takes precedence?
What is Lambda cold start and why does it happen? Name two concrete techniques to reduce its impact on a latency-sensitive API.
What is Lambda cold start and why does it happen? Name two concrete techniques to reduce its impact on a latency-sensitive API.