I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Santiago) in Feb 2016
Interview
1) You get contacted by phone by the recruiter. We discussed the usual: my past experience, why do I wanna work for them, and stuff like that.
2) If the recruiter thinks you are suitable for the job, he sends a link to solve a timed exercise. I don't remember the problem buy it was mid difficulty. Something to do with magic numbers and arrays.
3) I suspected they do not look at the solution, if the code passes the unit tests when you submit it, you are still on track, otherwise it ends here.
4) They offered to interview me in person in Santiago, Chile. If you do not live in the city, they pay for the plane ticket to get there. The technical interview consisted in 4 stages, each step with two developers and 45 minutes each, 2 were about solving algorithms in the whiteboard and 2 were a systems design question. I'll post the questions I remember.
I thought I did pretty well in 3/4 and the last one I struggled too much to solve it. I did not get an offer, it seems their decision has to be unanimous for a candidate to get an offer. I have to say that the devs were very nice and if you get stuck they help you get back on track (I suppose this is not good for you though in terms of points)
I put negative experience because I felt that if this was not for Amazon, I would had got an offer for sure. And let's face it, they are not NASA or something like that to only be targeting geniuses. Maybe I just did not fit their expected dev profile.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Implement the paint's bucket algorithm, imagine you have a grid with open or closed geometrical figures. Give (x,y) coordinates, paint the grid accordingly. He recommended recursive solution because iterative would take more than 30 minutes.
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.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.