I applied through college or university. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2012
Interview
First Amazon came to my school's career fair, and I spoke with one of their representatives. They asked me a simple question on how to find the second biggest number on a unsorted list and I had to code that as well. Then about 2 months later, I got an invite to their HQ for an onsite interview, and they paid for everything. There were a bunch of people interviewing with them as well. Each of us get four individual 1:1 interviews. Each interviewer is from a different department at Amazon. All of them are technical, and I had to code on a white board for each one of them. They also asked some small questions along with the coding questions for each one of them. Most of them are pretty easy. They said I should get a response within a week, but I didn't, so I emailed them after 1.5 weeks. Then they rejected me and didn't really tell me a reason. I thought I did pretty well. All the interviewers are nice and the experience was pretty good. Seattle is indeed a nice city. I just wish I had gotten the offer.
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.