Amazon QA Engineer Interview Questions

Amazon operates across several industries providing customer-focused products and services. Quality is an essential facet of Amazon’s consumer-centric vision. 

Quality Assurance (QA) engineers at Amazon work closely with software developers to evaluate the functionality of products and services through manual or automated tests. QA engineers run a series of test suites and cases to identify product defects and drive quality initiatives. 

QA engineers play an important role at Amazon, ensuring the company’s products and services meet the highest standards of excellence. 

In this article, we’ll look at the Amazon Quality Assurance Engineer interview process, including the type of questions asked at the interview. We also offer tips and insights to help you prepare for and ace your upcoming QA interview.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• The Amazon QA Interview Process
• Amazon QA Interview Questions
• Tips to Crack the Amazon QA Interview
• How to Prepare for a QA Interview

Amazon QA Interview Process

Amazon’s QA interview process is similar to Amazon’s coding interview process. Amazon’s QA interview process comprises the following 5 stages:

1. Evaluation of Your Coding Skills

Your knowledge of basic data structures (Arrays, Strings, Linked Lists, etc.) is assessed at this stage. To ace this coding interview, you have to be adept at an object-oriented programming language such as Java, Python, or C++. 

2. Evaluation of Your Testing Skills

At this stage of the Amazon QA engineer hiring process, you will be evaluated on your ability to plan and execute test strategies in a real-time situation. Experience in software testing is necessary to be successful in this round. 

3. Evaluation of Your Analytical Skills

Your ability to debug code, among other analytical skills, will be assessed in this round. Although similar to the coding interview, questions asked in this round will be more challenging and will involve algorithmic problems. 

4. Evaluation of Your Behavioral Skills 

Amazon follows a unique method to evaluate candidates’ behavioral skills. Amazon’s behavioral interview is based on Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles. 

In this round, you’ll be asked questions on workplace conduct and discipline, collaboration, leadership, initiative, and inclusion. 

5. The Amazon Bar Raiser Interview

The Bar Raiser round is the final stage of the interview process. It is conducted by a member of Amazon’s Bar Raiser team, i.e., a group of employees specially trained to hire only the best talent. 

At the Bar Raiser interview, you’ll be asked questions pertaining to:

• Your prospective role
• Your past projects and productivity
• Your potential value contribution to the team
• Your views on work-life balance and workplace situations

Amazon QA Interview Questions

Questions asked at Amazon’s QA interview are a mix of coding, testing, analytical, and behavioral questions. Given below are sample Amazon QA interview questions.

Amazon QA Interview Questions on Testing

Testing for bugs, errors, and inconsistencies is the primary role of an Amazon QA engineer. Below are some testing questions asked at Amazon’s QA interview:

• Explain the different types of software testing with examples.
• Explain the difference between bug leakage and bug release. 
• Explain the automation challenges software quality testers face.
• Devise a test strategy for a newly launched e-commerce website that sells books. 

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• Write test cases for an app that uploads files from a remote machine to the cloud. 
• Write a test case to validate an API for which the input is a URL to an HTML webpage. 
• Write test cases for when customers make credit card payments for products purchased online.
• What testing approach would you adopt for a smartphone that turns off when the alarm rings? 
• How would you test (optimally) the search feature on the Amazon e-commerce platform? How would you automate the process to check if search results are displayed correctly?
• Write smoke tests for the given situation:
  There are three modules with a fundamental defect in one of the modules.
  Module 3 gets its input from Module 1 and 2.
  How would you identify and report defects?

Amazon QA Interview Questions on Coding and Analytical Skills

Knowing how to code and approach problem-solving analytically is an essential requirement for QA engineers. 

Below are some coding questions asked at the Amazon QA interview. These questions are generally based on coding topics such as arrays, strings, linked lists, graphs, trees, hashing, and other coding concepts on algorithms and data structures. 

• Given K sorted arrays ‘arr’, of size N each, merge them into a new sorted array ‘res.’ (Solution)
• Given an array of integers ‘arr’ of size n, which is analogous to a continuous stream of integers input, find K largest elements from a given stream of numbers. (Solution)
• Given an array of integers, find any non-empty subarray whose elements add up to zero. (Solution)
• Find all magic triplets in a given integer array ‘arr’ of size n. A magic triplet is a group of three numbers whose sum is zero. Note that magic triplets may or may not be made of consecutive numbers in arr. (Solution)
• Given an integer, check whether it is a palindrome. (Solution)
• Given an integer n, find all possible ways to position n queens on an n×n chessboard so that no two queens attack each other. (Solution)
• Given the root node of a binary tree T, modify that tree in place, transform it into the mirror image of the initial tree T. (Solution)
• Given a variety of coin types defining a currency system, find the minimum number of coins required to express a given amount of money. Assume an infinite supply of coins of every type. (Solution)
• Given the daily prices of a stock, what’s the maximum possible profit one can generate by first buying one share of that stock on a certain day and then selling that share at least one day later? (Solution)
• Given a sequence, return its next lexicographically greater permutation. If such a permutation does not exist, then return it in ascending order. (Solution)

Go through more coding questions and their answers to improve your QA coding interview prep.

Amazon QA Interview Behavioral Questions

Behavioral interviews are a key part of the interview process at Amazon for all roles, whether junior, mid, or senior-level roles. Below are some sample behavioral questions asked at Amazon’s QA interview:

• What are the characteristics of a good leader?
• Give us an instance when you had to make an important decision based on limited data.
• How do you avoid distractions at work?
• What do you think makes for perfect work-life balance?
• How would you engage clients to keep them interested in a product or service?
• How would you deal with conflict with a coworker? 
• Describe how you handled an uncooperative coworker.
• Describe a disagreement you had with a superior on the course of a project. 
• Tell us about a time you had to enhance your skills to meet project requirements.
• What was the most difficult project you ever worked on? What were your key learnings from it?

For more behavioral questions that can be asked at Amazon’s QA engineer interview, check out these pages on  Amazon Behavioral Interview Questions and Amazon Leadership Principles Interview Questions.

Tips to Crack the Amazon QA Engineer Interview

Given below are some tips to help you ace your next QA engineer interview.

• Create an Impressive Project Portfolio

A strong project portfolio can give you a competitive edge. Create your portfolio using the STAR format, which highlights situations, tasks, actions, and results for each project. This will give interviewers the right context and clarity about projects as you talk about them. 

• Prepare Well for the Behavioral Interview

Behavioral interviews are a very important part of the Amazon interview process. Amazon’s behavioral interviews differ from behavioral interviews at other FAANG companies. The Bar Raiser round at Amazon focuses primarily on Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles.

Make sure you prepare answers to behavioral questions using the STAR format. Appearing unprepared at the behavioral round by answering questions unsatisfactorily can negatively impact your interview results. 

• Uplevel Your Problem-Solving and Analytical Skills 

Practice as many coding problems as possible before your interview. Try to practice at least 80 problems before your interview. This will help you identify different patterns that you can apply to solve new problems. 

• Earmark Adequate Time to Prepare for Your Interview

Give yourself a minimum of 8 weeks to prepare for the interview. Inadequate preparation time can cause you to overlook crucial technical concepts, weakening your competitive edge.

• Practice Mock Interviews

Mock interviews with the right professionals are a great way to polish your interviewing skills and become confident. 

At Interview Kickstart, you can practice mocks with instructors who are hiring managers and technical leads at Tier-1 companies, including Amazon. 

How to Prepare for a QA Interview

Kickstart your interview prep for your next QA engineer interview by availing the best guidance on technical interviews. Register for our free webinar to learn how to structure your interview prep. 

At IK, we help you develop a winning strategy to beat the competition and crack technical interviews at the biggest companies. Register to uplevel your career now!