I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2013
Interview
I had 2 phone interviews, then a web-cam interview and programming session, then a 6 hour long web-cam interview with 6 different people. The last step was intense and exhaustive. I talked to developers, managers and the director of the department. All of them was about my background experiences, some programming questions and problem solving sessions. Questions were not as difficult as the ones that exists on internet, but related to work group is developing. They do not require any particular language for solving problems, language is irrelevant for them, what they want to see is how you think and work. No brain teasers asked :)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked about the most difficult problem I had to solve in my past jobs, this was a difficult questions because I did not work on projects that are as complex as Amazon's systems and finding an impressive problem was very hard for me. Must be prepared about these questions beforehand.
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
