AMAZON · SYSTEM DESIGN
Amazon system design interview questions
SDE I loops lean toward object-oriented LLD, though light system design now appears in most SDE I loops. From SDE II, HLD is standard; SDE III and above may get two rounds that go deeper on non-functional requirements. Prompts are often framed around retail or AWS problems.
Which levels get a design round
| Level | Amazon title | Design round | Low-level design |
|---|---|---|---|
| SDE 1 | SDE I (L4) | Usually not | Yes |
| SDE 2 | SDE II (L5) | Yes | Yes |
| Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3) | SDE III / Senior SDE (L6) | Yes | – |
| Staff Software Engineer | Principal SDE (L7) and above | Yes | – |
Design questions candidates report
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Design an API rate limiter
A LADDER walkthrough of a rate limiter shared by many gateway servers: requirements, scale math for half a million requests a second and ten million keys, the rule and response API, Redis state, then the deep dives: choosing token bucket, atomic updates with a Lua script, keeping the added latency under a millisecond, sharding and hot keys, failing open, multiple regions and rolling out new rules safely.
Full walkthrough: Rate limiter Practise on the design board -
Design the store front page to handle 10x traffic
Design an online store where millions browse and thousands check out every minute. Requirements and scale, the shopping API and data model, then the hard parts: a read-optimized catalog with search and caching, a cart in a key-value store, inventory reservations that never oversell, a checkout saga with idempotent payments and an outbox, the order state machine, and where you can be eventually consistent.
Full walkthrough: E-commerce (Amazon) -
Design a hotel booking system
Design a ticket booking app where thousands of people fight over the same few hundred seats. Requirements and scale, the booking API and seat data model, then the hard parts: atomic multi-seat holds with expiry, optimistic versus pessimistic locking, tying payment to a hold without double booking, a virtual waiting room for blockbuster releases, live seat maps, and the trade-offs.
Full walkthrough: Movie booking
Also reported
- Design a parking lot (LLD)
- Design a warehouse / fulfillment system
- Design an A/B experimentation platform
How to answer any design question: the LADDER method · How the design round is scored by level · Low-level design and machine coding
Questions people ask
When does Amazon ask system design?
A design round is part of the loop for SDE 1 (SDE I (L4)), SDE 2 (SDE II (L5)), Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3) (SDE III / Senior SDE (L6)), Staff Software Engineer (Principal SDE (L7) and above). SDE I loops lean toward object-oriented LLD, though light system design now appears in most SDE I loops. From SDE II, HLD is standard; SDE III and above may get two rounds that go deeper on non-functional requirements. Prompts are often framed around retail or AWS problems.
What system design questions does Amazon ask?
Candidates report: Design an API rate limiter; Design the store front page to handle 10x traffic; Design a hotel booking system; Design a parking lot (LLD); Design a warehouse / fulfillment system; Design an A/B experimentation platform.
System design questions at other companies
- Microsoft
- Meta
- Apple
- Netflix
- Uber
- Airbnb
- Stripe
- Atlassian
- Goldman Sachs
- Salesforce
- Oracle
- Adobe
- Flipkart
- Walmart Global Tech
- PhonePe
- Swiggy
- Razorpay
System design questions across all companies · Behavioral questions