I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2012
Interview
Applied online, emailed me back after a couple of months. I took an online assessment, then they flew me out for an on-site interview. The interview lasted about 3 hours and consisted of 4-5 people.
Questions:
-Given two arrays of integers, find matches.
-Find path in tree that sums up to desired value, first complete path, then partial path.
-Head to tail problem - given a word (such as head) and a target word (such as tail) find if a path of words exists from source word to target word where each step is a new word created by changing one letter in the previous step. (head->heal->teal->tell->tall->tail)
-Given a square array of letters, find all english words in the left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and north-east directions.
-Convert integer to roman numeral
I choked on more than one.. mostly due to pressure I think. Walking back to the hotel, I thought of many better answers.
As far as the company goes, lots of young people, lots of dogs, really cool building, and relaxed atmosphere. Seattle is a great city, and it seemed like a nice place to work.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The head to tail problem was rather difficult for me... first I created a function to generate all words created by changing one letter of a word, then I mentioned doing iterative deepening DFS. Probably should have gone with A* search, with number of different letters as the heuristic... maybe keep a list of explored words to avoid duplicates.
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.