Amazon Software Engineer interview experience: systems prompts and declined offer

After a recruiter-style start, I went straight into a technical process that felt brutal because the hard topics kept piling up. One design prompt asked me to work through a concurrent restaurant waitlist and seating system, which meant reasoning about correctness and coordination instead of reaching for a quick answer. Next came a weighted binary-grid pathfinding problem that tested my algorithms. The last task was scheduling priority jobs with cooldowns, and its logic was easy to misread until I worked carefully through the constraints.

The pace and difficulty overwhelmed me. I received an offer but declined it because the experience was so intense that I did not want to repeat it.

Location: United States. Overall feedback: negative. Offer status: got offer.