I applied through college or university. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon in Nov 2011
Interview
First got interest by applying in person during a career fair and handing one of their employees a resume and talking to them briefly. I was given a pre-screen question, sometimes it's hit or miss, but they're generally quick questions you can reason out quickly if you've been prepping for interviews in general. They usually ask for a bit of code on paper or a algorithm/data structures question verbally when you hand them your resume, then a 1:1 interview or phone screen. Didn't get further than that. Afterwards, if you pass the first round, it's final round interviews on their campus.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
HashMap, Linked Lists, Stacks, associated Big O for basic operations.
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.
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.