I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Cape Town) in Jan 2010
Interview
I had 2 phone interviews which involved a number of questions about my education and work experience.
The onsite interview consisted of about 6 interview of 45 minutes, one of which takes place during lunch. These are all white board coding and problem solving questions. The length and number of interviews makes it a bit challenging.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a mutable string (array of characters) of words, how would you reverse the order of the words in the string, not the entire string. This must be done in place, i.e. not using any additional memory.
eg) "Hello World" => "olleH dlroW"
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.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.