Companies / Amazon

Amazon practice pack

Product company. SDET-style coding, test design at scale, and ownership stories.

These are our own practice questions for the kind of QA/SDET role this company hires for. They are not the company's real interview questions. Confirm the current process on the company's official careers page.

Skills this role is usually tested on

  • Coding
  • Test design at scale
  • Distributed systems testing
  • Behavioural stories
  • Operational thinking

Business areas used for scenarios

  • e-commerce
  • cloud
  • devices
  • logistics

6 questions

Answer out loud first, then open the guide. Most people read the guide too early.

  1. 1

    Given a list of order events with timestamps, return the orders that were placed but never shipped within 24 hours.

    mediumCoding

    A strong answer covers

    Group by order id, track earliest placed and earliest shipped, compare, handle out-of-order and duplicate events. State complexity and the tests you would add.

  2. 2

    Design the test strategy for an add-to-cart service that handles very high traffic.

    hardTest design

    A strong answer covers

    Unit and contract tests, load and soak, failure injection (cache down, dependency slow), consistency of cart across devices, rollout in stages with metrics and automatic rollback.

  3. 3

    Tell me about a time you found a serious defect late. What did you change afterwards?

    mediumBehavioural

    A strong answer covers

    Use a story with facts: what, impact, how it was found, the fix, and the change in process or tests so it cannot recur. Own your part.

  4. 4

    A message is delivered twice. How should the system and its tests handle it?

    hardDistributed

    A strong answer covers

    Idempotent consumers with a dedupe key, tests that replay messages, ordering and out-of-order cases, dead-letter handling, and checks on the final state.

  5. 5

    Write a rate limiter and the tests that would convince you it is correct.

    mediumCoding

    A strong answer covers

    Token bucket or sliding window, an injectable clock, boundary and burst cases, concurrency, and per-user isolation.

  6. 6

    How do you decide a release is safe when tests are green?

    mediumOperational

    A strong answer covers

    Canary or staged rollout, dashboards on error rate and latency, alarms, a tested rollback, and a clear owner on call.

Now say it to an interviewer

Reading a guide is not the same as answering under a clock. Run a mock interview and get scored feedback.

Start a mock interview Build a plan from a job description