I applied through college or university. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Waterloo, ON) in Oct 2012
Interview
The interview process was done through JobMine (Internship - I'm from Waterloo). The two "stages" were 45-minute technical interviews with two current developers on the team. Most of the code is on paper, but in some cases algorithm analysis and runtime analysis (big-O, specifically) is considered in your solutions. Be prepared for many questions on data structures and their implementations.
In the coding problems, they ideally want you to work in Java or C/C++. I did stuff in Scheme, which they did not appreciate.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
In a collection of strings, output the string that occurs most often.
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Calgary, AB) in Jun 2026
Interview
Online Assessment is the first step in the process. I didn’t have an HR phone screening and went straight to the OA after applying. It was sent to me about a week after I submitted my application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first question is LeetCode style algorithms question, and the second question gives a full stack repo (choice of Java, NodeJS, or Django) and asks to solve a backend issue which is causing a bug in the frontend. Unit tests must pass to pass the second question. You can run both backend/frontend indivdually or together
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2026
Interview
Recruiter reached out and set up an onsite loop after the initial steps. Four back to back rounds in one day. Two coding heavy rounds run by senior engineers, one round with the hiring manager, and one behavioral round with a bar raiser. Mix of leadership principles and data structures throughout. Heard back within a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard BFS grid problem. Given a grid, find the time for all cells to reach a target state where the spread happens one layer at a time.
How did you answer: Clarified the constraints, walked through the approach, then coded a clean BFS from all starting points at once. Tracked the number of layers until everything was covered.