The Ten Things You Just Looked At: Designing for Amazon Scale

I Might Have Peed My Pants In My Amazon Interview. Thanks Aaron Dykstra.

In one of the most deceptively simple interviews I had at Amazon, my Bar Raiser, Aaron Dykstra, asked me a question that any junior engineer might think they can nail with a textbook answer:

"Design a microservice that stores and retrieves the last ten items a person has visited on Amazon.com."

Simple, right?

Let’s unpack why this question is far more revealing than it appears, and how your answer can reflect not just your technical depth, but your maturity in system design thinking, your understanding of distributed systems, and your alignment with Amazon's Leadership Principles.

If you would like to prepare for your Amazon interview, feel free to reach out for a counseling session with me on LinkedIn!