What is in the Amazon new grad OA in 2026?

Amazon's OA page for full-time SDE roles lists a coding assessment (about 70 minutes on average), a Workstyles assessment (about 15), a Work Simulation (about 60) and a short feedback survey (amazon.jobs, retrieved 30 October 2026). Candidates who took it between May and October 2026 reported that the coding part now pairs one algorithm problem with a second task: fixing bugs in a multi-file web app with a built-in AI assistant, graded by about six test cases (LeetCode Discuss posts, May–October 2026).

Can you use the AI assistant to solve the Amazon OA?

Only partly. A candidate who took the OA on 9 October 2026 said the assistant helped locate the bugs but declined to fix them, and they passed none of the six tests. Amazon's OA page still says to avoid copying and pasting because it expects the code to be your own, and that browser usage is logged (amazon.jobs, retrieved 30 October 2026).

Why do new grads fail the Amazon Leadership Principles questions?

Usually because the story is the wrong size. Some claim a team's work as their own, which Amazon's own guide warns against when it tells candidates to use 'I' statements, and the story falls apart when the interviewer asks who else was involved. Others tell a purely reactive story about finishing an assigned task, which Huynh says he rejected even when the candidate named the principle. Size each story to what an SDE I owns: your own code, from design to operation.

Does Amazon sponsor visas for new grads?

The US 2027 early-career posting says nothing about sponsorship either way (amazon.jobs, retrieved 30 October 2026). Amazon did have more approved H-1B petitions for initial employment than any other employer in fiscal 2025, 4,644 (NFAP, November 2025). Ask your recruiter about your specific case before the loop.

Blog30 Oct 202613 min readApplr Team

Amazon SDE New Grad Interview 2026: AI OA, Bar Raiser, LP Trap

Amazon's new-grad OA now includes an AI-assisted debugging task, the loop is four one-hour rounds with a Bar Raiser, and most LP stories fail on scope.

Amazon changed its new-grad process in the one place most applicants stopped preparing for: the online assessment. Since spring 2026, candidates have reported a second coding task in which they fix bugs in a real multi-file app with an Amazon-supplied AI assistant, and the 2027 postings now list experience with AI coding tools as a basic qualification. The round that sinks most new grads is still the behavioural half, though. Amazon says roughly half of an SDE loop is Leadership Principles, and new grads lose it on scope: they either claim a team's work as their own or tell a story in which they only did what they were told. The fix is to size every story to what an SDE I actually owns, which Amazon's London posting defines as "the entire lifecycle of your code".

Below: what the 2027 postings say, the process stage by stage, what candidates actually saw in the AI-assisted OA, how the loop and the Bar Raiser work, the scope trap in detail, and a four-week plan.

Who Amazon is hiring for 2027

Posting	Where	Posted	Base pay	Line worth noticing
SDE, Early Career – 2027 (US)	Seattle plus 7 cities; Santa Clara	19 Oct 2026	$128,700; $148,100 in Santa Clara	AI-assisted development tools are a basic qualification
SDE – 2027 (London)	London	27 Oct 2026	Not listed	"As an SDE-I, you'll own the entire lifecycle of your code"
SDE, Early Career – 2027 (China)	Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen	6–14 Aug 2026	Not listed	Fluent Mandarin; graduation Oct 2026–Jul 2027
SDE Intern – Summer 2027 (USA)	Seattle plus 8 cities; Nashville	17 Sep 2026	$109,395 annualised; $103,955 in Nashville	The intern OA has no Work Simulation section

Source: amazon.jobs, retrieved 30 October 2026.

The US req covers the whole cohort and is reviewed on a rolling basis, so every week you wait costs interview slots. Its duties include using AI tools and then "critically validate, verify, and integrate AI-generated code". That sentence is the 2027 version of the job, and it shows up in the interviews too.

The volume has not shrunk. AWS chief executive Matt Garman told Platformer in June 2026 that Amazon was hiring 11,000 interns and new college grads that year. That came after Amazon cut about 16,000 corporate roles in January 2026, on top of 14,000 in October 2025 (KTVU FOX 2 / AP, 28 January 2026). Levels.fyi puts median US SDE I total compensation at $180,879: $136,235 base, $32,097 a year in stock and $12,547 in bonus (levels.fyi, updated 29 October 2026).

On a visa: the US posting says nothing about sponsorship. Amazon had 4,644 approved H-1B petitions for initial employment in fiscal 2025, more than any other employer (NFAP, November 2025). The $70,000 OPT fee that DHS proposed on 8 October is a proposal only and not in effect (Boston University ISSO, 8 October 2026). Confirm your situation with the recruiter before the loop, not after the offer.

The process, step by step

Stage	Format	What is graded	Timing
Application	One rolling req per country	Resume against the basic qualifications, including AI tools	Apply early
OA: coding	About 70 min on average; one algorithm problem plus, in 2026 reports, an AI-assisted debugging task	Test cases passed	Link usually expires in about 7 days (Simplify)
OA: Work Simulation	About 60 min on average; workplace scenarios where you rate responses	Judgement against the Leadership Principles	Full-time only
OA: Workstyles	About 15 min; pick which statement describes you	Consistency and fit	Both intern and full-time
Final loop	3–4 one-hour rounds in new-grad reports (LeetCode, Simplify), including the Bar Raiser	About half coding or low-level design, half Leadership Principles	Amazon says feedback within 5 business days

Section times are Amazon's averages from its OA page (amazon.jobs, retrieved 30 October 2026).

Amazon's general guide describes a 30-to-45-minute screen for most roles, but the one detailed US new-grad loop write-up we found from 2026 lists no screen between the OA and the loop. Gaps are common: Simplify's new-grad guide (updated July 2026) found 2025 loops took three to four months from OA to decision, including one candidate who heard nothing for about two and a half months after a clean OA before a December rejection.

The AI-assisted OA: what candidates actually saw

Amazon announced on 22 January 2026 that it had rebuilt its SDE assessment around an interactive AI assistant, because its engineers already work with tools such as Amazon Q, Cline and Kiro. It said 87% of candidates felt the questions related to the role (About Amazon). Candidate reports since then fill in the rest:

May 2026, SDE-1: a 40-minute algorithm problem, then a 60-minute task with a codebase, a preview of the website and three bugs to fix. Candidates chose a stack: Node with MERN, Java with Spring Boot, or Python with Django.
September 2026, 2027 intern OA: the candidate passed 15 of 15 tests on the algorithm problem and 6 of 6 on the AI debugging task, then did an inbox-style "Work at Amazon" simulation.
9 October 2026: a car-rental site in Django with two broken features. The candidate passed none of the six tests. The assistant helped find the bugs but declined to fix them.
26 October 2026, intern: a movie watchlist app in Spring Boot and React, with bugs in email validation, password length and watchlist retrieval.
27 October 2026, India intern: camera and audio proctoring, and a repository of several files averaging hundreds of lines each.

The pattern: the assistant is a navigator, not a fixer, and the grade is test cases. Whether you know the framework matters more than how many LeetCode problems you have done. The October candidate picked Django having watched it but never built anything in it, and that is the most avoidable way to score zero.

Amazon's OA page, retrieved today, still does not mention the assistant. It does say you may use publicly accessible online resources but not sites that need a login, that browser usage is logged, and that you should avoid copying and pasting because "we expect this to be your own code". Treat outside AI tools as off-limits; our guide to companies that ban AI in interviews covers how proctoring software catches them.

The loop and the Bar Raiser

A new grad who interviewed for SDE I on the S3 Glacier team in Seattle in August 2026 described four one-hour rounds:

Bar Raiser: Leadership Principles for the whole hour, no code.
15 minutes on their GenAI experience and how they use AI tools day to day, then 45 minutes on a sliding-window string problem.
15 minutes on Ownership, then a stack-based bracket-matching problem.
15 minutes on Ownership again, then low-level design of a rate limiter in C++.

They were rejected, and blamed round 3, where the interviewer gave so little feedback that they could not tell whether anything had landed. Two things in that loop matter for you: AI use is now an interview question, and Ownership came up twice, so one Ownership story is not enough.

The Bar Raiser is an interviewer from outside the hiring team (About Amazon, April 2025). Steve Huynh, who ran close to 1,000 interviews in 17 years at Amazon, about 600 of them as a Bar Raiser, describes the goal as hiring people better than half of those already doing the job at that level (Pragmatic Engineer, 21 April 2026; A Life Engineered, 22 April 2026). Amazon India's Bar Raisers say that in the debrief they debate the evidence rather than count votes, and they list forcing a principle into an answer and claims without data among the common mistakes (About Amazon India, October 2025).

The LP scope trap

Amazon's own guide tells you to use "I" statements, and its example is "I implemented a new feedback system that increased customer satisfaction scores by 40%." New grads copy that shape and inflate their part. Interviewers then ask follow-ups such as "What was the actual data?", "Who else was involved?" and "What would you do differently?" (DG Learning newsletter, May 2026), and an inflated story falls apart on the second one.

The opposite mistake is just as common. Huynh writes that he rejected candidates whose stories were entirely reactive, such as finishing what a manager assigned on schedule, even when they named the principle out loud (A Life Engineered, 22 April 2026).

The right size is narrower than most people think. Huynh's scope ladder puts entry level at work that affects your own productivity and begins to help teammates, typically implementing solutions others designed (Pragmatic Engineer, April 2026). Amazon's London posting says an SDE I owns its code from design through deployment and operations. So the target story is a piece you owned end to end, one decision you made, one teammate you helped, and a number you can defend.

Principle	Too big: falls apart on follow-up	Too small: reactive	Right size for SDE I (illustrative)
Ownership	"I led our migration to microservices"	"My manager gave me a ticket and I finished it on time"	"I owned the upload endpoint in our capstone, found it retried twice on timeouts, and added an idempotency check before the demo"
Dive Deep	"I redesigned the data pipeline"	"I fixed the bug QA reported"	"I traced a flaky test to a timezone assumption, wrote the failing case first, then fixed the parser"
Customer Obsession	"I improved satisfaction by 40%"	"I built what the spec said"	"I watched classmates use our app, saw several miss the save button, and moved it; the 'where did my work go' messages stopped"
Earn Trust	"Our team never had conflict"	"I agreed with the lead"	"I merged without review, broke the shared build, told the team within the hour and added a pre-merge check"

The last column uses no invented percentages. If you have a real number, use it; if you don't, describe the change you can see. Interviewers check whether a number is real faster than you can make one up.

What gets people rejected

Preparing the OA as pure LeetCode. The October candidate who scored 0 of 6 on the debugging task had chosen a framework they had never built in.
The one-story wonder. Huynh calls out candidates who reuse one big accomplishment for every question. With Ownership asked twice in a single loop, you need several.
"We" stories with no "I". Amazon's guide asks for "I" statements, and the "who else was involved?" follow-up exposes the gap.
Reactive stories. Doing your assigned work on time shows reliability, not Ownership.
No answer on AI. The posting requires AI-tool experience and one loop round opened with 15 minutes on it. Have a story about an assistant being wrong and how you caught it.
Coding in silence. You cannot read a silent interviewer, so say where you are: "brute force works; here is the better approach; shall I code it?"

A 4-week plan

Week 1: Apply to the 2027 req now. Add one resume line showing how you used an AI assistant and checked its output. Pick your OA stack and build or debug a small app in it that has login, a form and a list.
Week 2: One timed 40-minute algorithm problem a day. Twice this week, clone an unfamiliar open-source repo, break a test and fix it under a 60-minute limit. Practise coding without an IDE, as Amazon's topics page recommends.
Week 3: Write 8–10 stories, at least two each for Ownership, Dive Deep, Customer Obsession and Earn Trust. Check each against the scope table above. Keep each to 2–3 minutes, which is Amazon's guidance, and record yourself as Huynh suggests.
Week 4: Run a full mock loop: four 60-minute rounds, each 15 minutes of LP and 45 of coding, with one low-level design such as a rate limiter or parking lot. Have one person play the silent interviewer.

Practice

Amazon SDE1 mock interview: Applr's Amazon mock drills LP stories against follow-up questions, plus the coding rounds.
Polish your resume for Amazon, including the AI-tools line the 2027 posting asks for.
New Grad 2027 tracker for which reqs are open now.
Two weeks of hiring news, including Amazon's 2027 posting.

Sources

Frequently asked questions

What is in the Amazon new grad OA in 2026?: Amazon's OA page for full-time SDE roles lists a coding assessment (about 70 minutes on average), a Workstyles assessment (about 15), a Work Simulation (about 60) and a short feedback survey (amazon.jobs, retrieved 30 October 2026). Candidates who took it between May and October 2026 reported that the coding part now pairs one algorithm problem with a second task: fixing bugs in a multi-file web app with a built-in AI assistant, graded by about six test cases (LeetCode Discuss posts, May–October 2026).
Can you use the AI assistant to solve the Amazon OA?: Only partly. A candidate who took the OA on 9 October 2026 said the assistant helped locate the bugs but declined to fix them, and they passed none of the six tests. Amazon's OA page still says to avoid copying and pasting because it expects the code to be your own, and that browser usage is logged (amazon.jobs, retrieved 30 October 2026).
How many rounds is the Amazon new grad final loop?: Amazon's general guide describes four to six interviews of 45 to 60 minutes, about half technical and half Leadership Principles (About Amazon, April 2025). A new grad who interviewed for SDE I in Seattle in August 2026 described four one-hour rounds: a Bar Raiser round that was all Leadership Principles, then three rounds of about 15 minutes of behavioural questions and 45 minutes of coding or low-level design (LeetCode Discuss, September 2026).
What does the Bar Raiser do in an Amazon new grad interview?: The Bar Raiser is an interviewer from outside the hiring team whose job is to protect the hiring standard (About Amazon). Steve Huynh, who did about 600 Bar Raiser interviews in 17 years at Amazon, describes the goal as hiring people better than half of those already doing the job at that level (Pragmatic Engineer and A Life Engineered, April 2026). Amazon India's Bar Raisers say they debate the evidence in the debrief rather than count votes (About Amazon India, October 2025).
Why do new grads fail the Amazon Leadership Principles questions?: Usually because the story is the wrong size. Some claim a team's work as their own, which Amazon's own guide warns against when it tells candidates to use 'I' statements, and the story falls apart when the interviewer asks who else was involved. Others tell a purely reactive story about finishing an assigned task, which Huynh says he rejected even when the candidate named the principle. Size each story to what an SDE I owns: your own code, from design to operation.
Does Amazon sponsor visas for new grads?: The US 2027 early-career posting says nothing about sponsorship either way (amazon.jobs, retrieved 30 October 2026). Amazon did have more approved H-1B petitions for initial employment than any other employer in fiscal 2025, 4,644 (NFAP, November 2025). Ask your recruiter about your specific case before the loop.

Practice for top companies

Browse all interview guides View all articles