I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Bengaluru) in Dec 2009
Interview
The first round consisted of a written test, testing the background in Computer Science on various topics like Operating Systems, Networks, Compilers, Algorithms and data structures and programming questions on basic data structures.
Then the 1:1 interview rounds begin for shortlisted candidates. In the first round they asked me to code a simple BST based problem (most probably finding common ancestor of two nodes.). They asked for the exact code and the interviewer coded it on the laptop to check the code.
In the 2nd round, they asked me to design an efficient data structure to store strings and compare strings. This involved using dictionary and I solved it in some time. I did not go through this round.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a data structure to store strings efficiently for following operations :
1. IsPrefix (s1, s2) : Is s1 a prefix of s2.
2. IsEqual(s1, s2) : Are s1 and s2 equal.
3. common prefix(s1, s2) : Return the common prefix of the given strings s1 and s2.
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.