I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2014
Interview
I received an email invitation to do an online coding screen. I did the screen which was very easy and they immediately invited me onsite; flown out to Seattle where I was put up in a nice hotel. I actually had a moment where I was afraid I made a mistake while sitting in the lobby waiting for my grilling, based on the amazing number of people there for orientation. I really did not like the idea of working for a company that treats their employees like a number, but I obviously forged on. I went in for my interviews and I was in over my head. I didn't really feel the questions were very fair, and I don't think my inability to answer some of them is indicative of my capabilities. I am probably a bit bitter about the whole thing, but I have since found out (from several former employees) that Amazon really overworks and burns out their employees. I unsurprisingly did not get an offer. In hindsight and after speaking with former Amazon employees, I think it was for the best.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design an algorithm for finding possible meeting times between X number of people given each of those people's current schedules.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.