I applied through college or university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (San Diego, CA) in Nov 2012
Interview
I saw amazon at UCSD career fair (DECAF). I talked to an engineer and he asked me to describe round robin. I answered the questions and a week later I got a request to do a phone interview.
The first phone interview went well. The interviewer asked me an algorithm question regarding finding duplicates in a list. He had me write it out on paper. When I was done, I read him the code (in java). Basically I used a hashmap to store values in the list, if a duplicate was found the value in the map was increased upon entry. It was pretty straight forward. There was one other restriction but I can't remember. (sorry)
The second phone interview was with a senior level engineer. He asked much more difficult questions and didn't allow much time to process the question or do the alogrithms. The coding was done via an online collaboration tool. He wrote some method headers and I filled them in. He really was pushing the pace, wouldn't let me think much about the problems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a spase matrix, create a class that would:1. have a method to take the sparse matrix and put into a more efficient data structure. 2. retreive data from the data structure. 3. Use a data structure that would produce an iterator that keeps track of the order in which the entries were added.
I was given a class for the data type (xi, xj, value).
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.