I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2009
Interview
My resume was submitted via a friend to an internal recruiter with Amazon.com. The resume was then picked up by a department seeking an SDE. The department's recruiter contacted me via email to set up a phone interview, which was scheduled in short order.
At the appointed time, I received a call from the interviewer who turned out to be a SDE in the department (as opposed to the hiring manager). She provided me an overview of the responsibilities of her team and then asked me to say a little about myself, which I did. Then the interview got technical. She asked me a data structures/selection algorithm question followed by an object question. After I was done with those, I had an opportunity to ask questions, which I did. The entire interview took an hour.
While I get that amazon.com deals with large quantities of data and efficient evaluation of that data is necessary, I think they may be eliminating very good candidates with excellent capacity to learn (like myself, of course) by asking for answers to questions that the CODE IS ALREADY WRITTEN FOR. This is a commentary, of course on the data structure/algorithm question. Object design is a more obvious way to see how I think and approach problem solving.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What are the first 2 integers that, when added together, equal 10 in a "very large" array of unsigned integers?
Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
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