Amazon Coding Interview Questions: Patterns and Top Problems
Amazon runs one of the highest-volume interview operations in tech, and its question bank stays close to the classics. That is good news if you prepare with a system. Most tagged problems are Medium standards with known templates, and the list changes slowly.
This page ranks the coding questions that appear most often in Amazon’s tagged problem data. Every row links to the pattern guide on this site that teaches the technique behind the problem. The second half turns the topic and difficulty numbers into a study order that leaves room for behavioral work, because at Amazon you cannot skip that part.
The short version
- Mediums hold 56 percent of tagged problems. Easy questions add 28 percent.
- Arrays touch 55 percent of tagged problems. Strings sit at 22 percent and hash tables sit at 20 percent.
- The bank rewards known templates and steady breadth. Hard problems hold 16 percent of the set. Basics decide most rounds here.
Amazon’s Interview Loop
- An online assessment comes first for many roles, especially new grad ones. It mixes coding tasks with work-simulation questions.
- One or two phone screens follow. Expect standard coding problems in a live editor.
- The onsite loop runs about four rounds in one day.
- Coding rounds sit next to rounds built on Amazon’s leadership principles. Every interviewer scores against those principles, not only the behavioral specialist.
- Senior levels add system design depth.
- Many candidate reports mention a bar raiser, an extra interviewer with veto power who joins the loop.
The split matters for planning. Half your proof is code. The other half is evidence that you work the way Amazon describes in its principles. Candidates who prepare only algorithms often lose the offer in a leadership round. Budget real time for both.
The Questions Amazon Asks Most
LeetCode tags problems by company from candidate reports and gives each tag a relative frequency score from 0 to 100. These 20 score highest for Amazon right now. Fourteen of them reach the very top band. Each row links to our guide for that technique.
If you learn five guides first, learn these
- Start with array manipulation . Arrays touch 55 percent of tagged problems.
- Pair it with hash table . Two Sum and Group Anagrams both run through it.
- Learn two pointers next. Four rows use it, including Trapping Rain Water and 3Sum.
- Study sliding window beside it. Fruit Into Baskets and the Longest Substring row share its movement rules.
- Finish with binary search . Koko Eating Bananas teaches the answer-space form. Median of Two Sorted Arrays builds on it.
| Problem | Difficulty | Demand | Pattern Guide |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two Sum | Easy | Very high | Hash Table |
| Trapping Rain Water | Hard | Very high | Two Pointers |
| Longest Substring Without Repeating Characters | Medium | Very high | Sliding Window |
| Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock | Easy | Very high | Kadane’s Algorithm |
| Maximum Coins From K Consecutive Bags | Medium | Very high | Array Manipulation |
| Add Two Numbers | Medium | Very high | Linked List |
| Group Anagrams | Medium | Very high | Hash Table |
| LRU Cache | Medium | Very high | Linked List |
| Fruit Into Baskets | Medium | Very high | Sliding Window |
| 3Sum | Medium | Very high | Two Pointers |
| Number of Islands | Medium | Very high | Graph Traversal |
| Koko Eating Bananas | Medium | Very high | Binary Search |
| Longest Palindromic Substring | Medium | Very high | Two Pointers |
| Median of Two Sorted Arrays | Hard | Very high | Binary Search |
| Merge Intervals | Medium | High | Interval Scheduling |
| Palindrome Number | Easy | High | Math Algorithms |
| Majority Element | Easy | High | Hash Table |
| Container With Most Water | Medium | High | Two Pointers |
| Top K Frequent Elements | Medium | High | Heap Priority Queue |
| Reorganize String | Medium | High | Greedy Algorithms |
One detail in this list deserves attention. Koko Eating Bananas looks like nothing else here, but it shares machinery with Median of Two Sorted Arrays. Both solve a search over answers rather than a search over array positions. That idea appears again and again at Amazon, and it separates candidates who memorized problems from candidates who own patterns.
Topics and Difficulty at Amazon
The most common topics among all tagged Amazon problems appear below. The share is the percent of tagged problems that carry the topic. Problems can carry several topics, so the shares add to more than 100 percent.
| Topic | Tagged Problems | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Array Manipulation | 249 | ~55% |
| String Manipulation | 100 | ~22% |
| Hash Table | 92 | ~20% |
| Dynamic Programming | 75 | ~17% |
| Sorting | 72 | ~16% |
| Two Pointers | 57 | ~13% |
| Math Algorithms | 56 | ~12% |
| Binary Search | 53 | ~12% |
| Graph Traversal (DFS) | 50 | ~11% |
| Greedy Algorithms | 44 | ~10% |
Sorting carries no link because we treat it as part of other patterns rather than a pattern of its own. The shape of the rest of the table matches what experienced candidates report. Arrays, strings, and hashes dominate. Dynamic programming holds a steady mid-tier share, close to Google’s level, so basic DP remains required study here. Depth-first search earns its row through grid problems like Number of Islands.
Difficulty splits close to even thirds between Easy and Hard:
| Difficulty | Problems | Share |
|---|---|---|
Easy | 127 | 28% |
Medium | 253 | 56% |
Hard | 70 | 16% |
More than half of tagged Amazon problems are Mediums, which mirrors Google almost exactly. The difference sits in volume. Amazon asks far more tagged problems overall, so its interviews draw from a wide pool. Breadth of pattern knowledge protects you there better than luck does.
Method: the top 20 rows come from LeetCode company-tagged lists for Amazon, ranked by relative frequency scores from 0 to 100. Shares overlap because one problem can carry several topics.
Where to Spend Your Prep Time
- Cover the array, string, and hash trio before anything else. They appear in well over half of tagged problems together. Start with the array manipulation , string manipulation , and hash table guides.
- Study sliding window and two pointers side by side. Both rank in the top ten topics, and they share movement mechanics. Work the sliding window and two pointers guides back to back.
- Learn binary search on the answer space. Koko Eating Bananas is the entry point, and harder Amazon variants build on it. The binary search guide covers the base form.
- Prepare leadership stories with the same discipline as code. Write one story per principle you expect, in situation, task, action, result form. Rehearse out loud until each takes under two minutes.
- Schedule reviews instead of trusting memory. Recall decays on a curve, and spaced repetition flattens it. The app times each card so old problems stay warm while new ones settle in.
graph TD
A["Array, string, and hash trio"] --> B["Sliding window and two pointers"]
B --> C["Binary search on the answer space"]
C --> D["Leadership stories told in under two minutes"]
D --> E["Top 20 solved once"]
E --> F["Spaced repetition until interview day"]
The diagram follows the prep plan from the core trio through code and stories to scheduled review.
Questions Candidates Ask
Are most Amazon questions Medium?
Yes. More than half of tagged problems rank Medium at 56 percent. Breadth of pattern knowledge protects you there better than luck does.
What links Koko Eating Bananas to Median of Two Sorted Arrays?
Both solve a search over answers rather than a search over array positions. That idea appears again and again at Amazon. The binary search guide covers the base form.
How much time should leadership stories get?
Half your proof is code. The other half is evidence that you work the way Amazon describes in its principles. Write one story per principle you expect, in situation, task, action, result form.
What should I study first?
Start with the array manipulation guide. Arrays touch 55 percent of tagged problems. Then add hash table and string manipulation for the rest of the trio.
Next Steps
Work down the top 20 table and open the linked guide whenever a technique feels slow. The coding patterns index lists every guide on the site, and sliding window plus two pointers give you the fastest start for this list. Interviewing elsewhere too? Compare the topic weight in the Google guide and the speed demands in the Meta guide .