I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2010
Interview
I had 2 phone interviews and one on-site one.
Phone interviews were very easy. Some algorithm questions in addition to some OO concepts.
The only weird thing about the phone interview is that you should read your program word by word for the interviewer when he/she asks you to implement an algorithm.
On-site interview was some how difficult. It was an one-day interview consists of 6 different interviews with different people.
One these guys is the Bar-raiser which is the most important one. Failing in his/her interview may cause you to fail whole the interview even if you do your best in other interviews.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.