The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2011
Interview
I was in one room for 6 hours and had 5 1 on 1 interviews. The recruiter changed the interview dates and sent me to a building that was not on their directory. Thanks to the mix-up I was late, I'm sure this was a mark against me.
The five people who interviewed me were nice enough. I have a feeling they weren't really interested in interviewing me as they all seemed kind of checked out throughout the whole process. Lots of brain teasers. Lots of questions on Sorting and Hashing. QuckSorts and HeapSorts. I got the feeling that my answers were correct and good enough but they had already decided on their candidate.
The impression I left was not favorable due to the issues getting to the interview and the overall atmosphere- lots of for-show security around the buildings, high on image, low on substance.
Final impressions: everyone I spoke with was very smart and very nice but at the end of the day they seemed less than the sum of their parts which is unfortunate- I can envision each one of them doing something more fulfilling.
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.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.