Just finished 2026 Amazon The OA of SDE (partial to NG) can be summed up in one sentence: longer time, more severe screening. The total duration of OA this year has been extended to about 3.5 to 4 hours. Doing it continuously will test your concentration and physical strength. It is recommended not to work on deadlines. Status is very important. Following the four parts of OA, I will sort out my own real experience and some pitfalls to avoid, and provide a reference for students who have not yet done it or are preparing for it.
Interview Overview |2026 Amazon OA
Overall duration: 3.5–4 hours
Structure: 4 Parts, fixed order
- Coding Challenge (about 90 minutes, 2 questions)
- System Design (partial business understanding + structural expression)
- Work Simulation (situational decision-making, strong LP orientation)
- Workstyles (personality and culture fit assessment)
The obvious changes this year are: the difficulty of Coding has been increased + the weight of Work Simulation has become higher. It is no longer just a matter of passing the technical skills.
Coding Challenge
This part of Coding consists of two algorithm questions and is given 90 minutes. In terms of time, it is more generous than in previous years, but the difficulty has obviously gone up a notch. The overall feeling is not about "whether you can finish writing", but more about whether your foundation is solid and whether the problem-solving process is clear.
This year is no longer the kind of "guaranteed guarantee for simple questions" spread online. The two questions I encountered were both variants in the high-frequency direction. One was a classic tree construction problem, using pre-order and in-order traversal to restore a binary tree, but with adjustments in the input form and boundary conditions; the other was a question that combined HashMap and prefix sum, with a layer of background that is biased towards AWS scenarios. The logic itself is not new, but there are many details.
Judging from the experience of classmates and myself, content related to Graph and Tree is still the top priority, such as the number of islands, traversal of trees or graphs, and layer-order traversal of N-ary trees. These are almost mandatory directions. At the same time, strings and basic data structures will also appear repeatedly. Old questions like string segmentation and LRU Cache can still be tested in another way.
One very practical point is time allocation. Don't stay stuck on the first question for too long. After being stuck on the first question for nearly 20 minutes, I decisively switched to the second question. Instead, the rhythm became much smoother. Finally, I went back to the first question and my thinking became much clearer.
System Design
This part of System Design does not require writing code at all. The focus is to explain the ideas clearly and try to be as close to Amazon's real business scenarios as possible. This year, I clearly feel that if you simply apply a general system design template, the scores will not be particularly good-looking.
What I myself encountered was designing an Amazon warehousing system, and some friends around me also asked design questions related to video streaming platforms, which required consideration of CDN, storage and scalability. This type of question itself is not tricky, but it depends on whether you can "put the question into actual business".
When answering questions, we generally start with needs and goals, such as what core problems the warehousing system needs to solve, whether it is real-time inventory synchronization, order sorting efficiency, or stability during peak periods. Next, let’s talk about the overall architecture, how the front-end, back-end, and storage are layered, and how the modules collaborate. Finally, add some key details, such as concurrency processing, peak traffic, fault tolerance, or cost.
Work Simulation
This section is basically an immersive work scenario multiple-choice question with no standard answers. The core is all Amazon’s 16 Leadership Principles.
One scenario I encountered was that the module I was responsible for had a bug, which had begun to affect users. At the same time, another project was approaching its deadline, and I needed to make a priority decision. On the surface, this type of question is about choosing a plan, but it is actually about whether you can actually apply the principles of Customer Obsession, Ownership, and Delivery Results into decision-making.
If you just choose based on your feelings, it's easy to choose the option that "looks reasonable but isn't too flimsy." The basic strategy is to think clearly about which LPs this decision corresponds to before making a choice.
Workstyles
Finally, there is Workstyles, which looks like a personality test, but is actually about cultural fit. The easiest thing to overturn here is the inconsistency. For example, at the beginning, I chose to communicate and cooperate, but later I chose to work alone. This contradictory system can be seen.
There is no need to deliberately create a character, but the overall style must be unified, proactive, responsible, and able to advance things, rather than being too passive or waiting for instructions.
A little overall feeling
In summary, the biggest feeling is that this year’s Amazon SDE OA cannot be stabilized by algorithms alone. Coding is still important, but Work Simulation and Workstyles have obviously become more and more critical screening points. If you want to prepare, the algorithm must at least stabilize the high-frequency basic direction. Don't just use general templates for System Design. For Work-related modules, it is best to truly understand the 16 LPs in advance instead of just memorizing the names. The above is the first-hand experience I just finished the exam for reference, and additional exchanges are welcome.
Follow-up & preparation summary
By the way, the results. This time for Amazon OA, I asked programhelp to do the whole process. OA assistance , about a week later, I received an email from Recruiter, notifying me that I have entered the next round of VO. Looking back at this OA, if you just rely on yourself to support yourself, you will probably fall into a trap. If you are also preparing for OA/VO from Amazon or other major companies, you can contact programhelp directly to learn about the corresponding interview assistance and running support.
