I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2+ months. I interviewed at Amazon (San Diego, CA) in May 2024
Interview
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 72 days from application to rejection email. The process consisted of an initial first interview with one of the engineers on the team, which included a programming challenge (Leetcode 200: Number of Islands), some questions about my experience and background, and some questions about deadlocks and the hardware architecture of a system I worked on.
After passing this, I was moved onto the final interview loop, which included four hour-long interviews with the team and hiring manager, which include two Leetcode hard questions, one question on designing a dynamic array, a system design question, and a bunch of questions on the following Amazon leadership principles:
Dive Deep
Deliver Results
Customer Obsession
Ownership
Disagree and Commit
Bias for Action
Insist on High Standards
Learn and Be Curious
I thought the interviews overall went pretty well and I was surprised to receive a generic rejection email three days afterwards. I will likely not being applying to Amazon again. The recruiters were very supportive and responsive. However, the process was too long and I received no feedback on why I was rejected, so I can't justify going through it again.
Leetcode 23: Merge k Sorted Lists (This one was slightly altered to be files of log entries (entry objects) with a date property rather than linked lists of nodes with values)
Design a class for a dynamically resizing array, which is initialized to 100 elements at first. The user should be able to append and pop from the end of the array.
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.
Um teste de código online, se aprovado, vai para o loop. O loop é 4 entrevistas seguidas, duas em inglês e duas em português. 3 entrevistas técnicas de código, todas as 4 têm pergunta de liderança.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pergunta historicas baseada nos principios de lideranca da amazon.
