I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2010
Interview
The phone interview was slated to be an hour long, started on time and was 1 hour exactly. It was the 2nd such interview, and I have a 3rd scheduled. No idea how many more rounds there will be.
It began with a brief questioning of my past work experience, and soon moved on to technical questions largely covering data structures and algorithms, from simple (calculate change for a cash register) to complex (knapsack problem, dynamic programming). I was also given a design problem of an e-commerce site and asked to describe some of the basic objects I would need for customers, inventory, orders and shipping, and their interactions.
I was expected to provide a pseudo-code solution to the data structures and algorithms questions, which made pen and paper a necessity. It might be more helpful to sit at a computer and actually code up the solution in something like PHP or Python.
The interviews have (thus far) been very nice and tolerant of you not reaching a complete solution to the problems on your first iteration. They may even help walk you through a tough part.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a set of coins of arbitrary denominations, write an algorithm to calculate all possible ways to generate change for a given amount.
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