Amazon system design interview questions
8 questions on this site are reported in Amazon software engineer interviews. Each is a guided run through requirements, back-of-envelope numbers, an interactive design, user flows and deep dives with interviewer follow-ups. Patterns covered: key-generation, caching, cdn, analytics, real-time, websockets, fan-out, chat, consistency, idempotency, ledger, fintech, transcoding, adaptive-bitrate, pipelines, storage, geospatial, matching, streaming, marketplace, multi-channel, rate-limiting, priority-queues, frontier, politeness, dedupe, scheduling, distributed-queues, algorithms, counters, redis, edge.
Attribution comes from public interview guides and candidate reports, not from Amazon. It indicates where a question has been asked, nothing more.
Design a URL Shortener
bit.ly at scale: turn long URLs into short codes, redirect in milliseconds from anywhere, count the clicks.
Design Slack
Real-time team messaging: channels, DMs, presence, history and search for millions of concurrent users.
Design a Payment System
Accept card payments for an e-commerce platform, move money correctly exactly once, and be able to prove it.
Design YouTube
Upload, transcode, and stream video to a billion viewers: a processing pipeline on one side, a CDN problem on the other.
Design Uber
Match riders with nearby drivers in seconds, track trips live, and price them, for millions of concurrent users worldwide.
Design a Notification System
Deliver push, email, SMS and in-app notifications to hundreds of millions of users: the right channel, once, on time, and never at 3 a.m.
Design a Web Crawler
Fetch billions of pages a month politely, discover new links, skip duplicates, and keep the copy fresh without getting the crawler banned.
How to prepare for a Amazon system design interview
Large-company loops run 45 to 60 minutes, expect numbers, and spend most of the time on deep dives. Work each question above in practice mode until you can produce the requirements, the estimates and the flows without looking, then read the interview framework guide for how to structure the hour. The other questions on the site teach patterns that show up in Amazon interviews under different names.
- Design a News Feedfan-out · ranking · caching
- Design Google Mapsgeospatial · routing · graphs
- Design a Matchmaking Systemqueues · scheduling · latency