I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2010
Interview
Was called by Amazon's recruiter after she had seen my resume on a jobs site. Set up a phone interview 4 days later.
The hiring manager was friendly and polite. Wanted to help me out. But I screwed up the interview. After reading the reviews here, these were very simple questions, but I'm not too good in algorithms and am afraid that my extensive experience in OO design and architecture gets short shifted in this type of an interview. I expect that people with strong Math background would do really well.
Anyway the questions asked were
1. Write the program to return a list of specified prime numbers.
2. Given two strings, determine if the two words are anagrams.
3. Compute the Big O of the solution.
Now, at least the first two seem simple (even if using just a brute-force algorithm), but while doing this on the phone with syntactically correct code, it was not easy.
I have about 20 years of enterprise application development. I think perhaps they need to have different type of phone interviews based on the background. But I guess it's one way to evaluate the thought process and given that this is Amazon, I guess algorithmic efficiency is probably in line with the scale.
Note that though I have selected that this was a difficult interview, it's primarily my own inadequacy in dealing with algorithmic questions.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write the program to return a list of specified prime numbers.
Loop — 4 rounds, all on the same day
Round 1 — Coding (DSA)
Interviewer was a senior SDE, very friendly.
Warm-up + behavioral: "Tell me about a time you took ownership of something outside your responsibilities."
Main question: Given a list of meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms required. I used a heap. He then asked a follow-up: what if meetings could be reassigned to minimize total idle time? We discussed approaches but didn't fully code it.
He cared a lot about how I talked through edge cases out loud.
Round 2 — Coding + Problem Solving
LP question: "Describe a situation where you disagreed with a teammate."
Coding: LRU Cache implementation from scratch. I used a hashmap + doubly linked list. He pushed on thread-safety and what happens at capacity 0.
Round 3 — Behavioral (Bar Raiser)
This was the toughest round — no coding, all Leadership Principles, very deep STAR-format probing.
Questions I got:
"Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned."
"A time you had to deliver something with a tight deadline and limited information."
The bar raiser kept drilling: "What was your specific contribution?" "What would you do differently?" "What data did you use?" Have 6–8 strong stories ready with metrics.
Round 4 — Low-Level Design
Design: Design a parking lot system (classes, vehicle types, spot allocation, pricing). Then he asked me to code the findSpot() and releaseSpot() methods.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most coding questions were LeetCode Medium. Common themes: graphs, heaps, sliding window, hashmaps, and LRU/design., system design,
Great interview process with three rounds, including a technical assessment and a technical interview. The interviewers were professional and supportive throughout the process. The questions mainly focused on DSA, problem-solving, and core technical concepts. The discussions were engaging and provided a good opportunity to demonstrate technical skills. Overall, the process was well-structured, smooth, transparent, and a very positive experience.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Amazon (Dublin, Dublin)
Interview
Online techincal assessment. Had to screen share and complete basic coding tasks similar to Leet Code. Could choose a language of your choice. Overall a very fair system and judged based on merit.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical assessment so a basic leet code style question about reversing the orders of long numerical strings.