I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2012
Interview
I had a two sessions of 1:1 interviews with two interviewers ( software engineers from amazon).
Each one lasted 45 minutes and the interviews happened in my university . The questions were not trivial nor impossible to answer but they were tricky and you had to think clearly before you answer any question. The first interview session was on data structures in general ( arrays, lists, binary trees, bst , hash-tables). We really did go deep into hash-tables ( I think that's where i messed up). The second interview consisted of programming an algorithm ( design and coding). That part was easier for me. The second interview was really impressed by my performance and from his point of view, he was sure i was going to get an offer. But i think my flop in hash tables ( which I did not know in depth at the time) caused me to lose the offer. Hopefully next year will be better. One advice: prepare for the worse, don't expect anything to be easy. Never give an answer without looking at every angles.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
how do you make sure a hash-table is performing efficiently?
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.