I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2013
Interview
Did a half day onsite. They never collected my NDA and didn't seem interested in it, so I guess I can feel freer to talk about it.
Met with a couple of managers who clearly hated me on sight. I felt I did a good job answering the questions, however, they pretended they didn't understand. They never made eye contact, kept their arms folded, focused on other things while I worked at the whiteboard. Didn't pay attention at all. I stood there for a while, while the guy read his email, then he snapped out of it and began fault finding and displaying a general attitude of contempt. (note: I am an unattractive older American female, so it sure felt prejudicial, but who knows, maybe they are that way with everyone)
Be careful, they will ask you about what you did at former companies. Always always say that you can't discuss it, no matter how cool or interesting it was. They are testing you to see if you will give away company secrets.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How does Facebook work? How would you design it
How does automatic suggestion work? How would you design it to scale, performance, distributed cache, etc.
Describe something you worked on at a former company. Explain in detail. (trick question! Always answer that it was proprietary and cannot be discussed)
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.