Mock system design interview at Amazon
A live 45-minute round on one of the questions reported in Amazon interviews, run by an AI interviewer that asks one thing at a time, probes what you say, and weighs what that round is reported to weigh. It ends with a debrief: a score, what was strong, what was missing.
Design a URL Shortener
bit.ly at scale: turn long URLs into short codes, redirect in milliseconds from anywhere, count the clicks.
You will not see the requirements, the numbers or the diagram before you start — that is the point.
What the Amazon round is reported to look like
45–60 minutes, with Leadership Principles woven through the technical discussion rather than kept in a separate round.
What it weighs
- Customer obsession: starting from the user experience and working back
- Dive deep: explaining the internals of anything you put on the board
- Bias for action: making a decision and moving, rather than enumerating options
- Operational ownership — monitoring, on-call, what breaks at 3 a.m.
The common mistake
Hedging. Naming three options and picking none reads as indecision here more than anywhere else; choose, justify, and say what would change your mind.
From public interview guides and candidate reports, not from Amazon. The interviewer is an AI running in that style; it is practice, not a prediction.
Start the round
Other companies: Anthropic · Google · Meta · OpenAI · Microsoft · Uber · Stripe · NVIDIA