I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2012
Interview
Applied online and 2 weeks later got the email from a recruiter that contained the template describing the interview process. It took 6 weeks to complete the 2 phone interviews which was really long. On their defense it was holiday season but still it was just too long. Finally got invited for on-site interviews. Had 5 back to back interviews. I was really feeling good about it but I got the call 1 week later telling me it was a close decision but they decided not to offer. No feedback was provided.
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.