I applied through college or university. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2012
Interview
First Amazon came to my school's career fair, and I spoke with one of their representatives. They asked me a simple question on how to find the second biggest number on a unsorted list and I had to code that as well. Then about 2 months later, I got an invite to their HQ for an onsite interview, and they paid for everything. There were a bunch of people interviewing with them as well. Each of us get four individual 1:1 interviews. Each interviewer is from a different department at Amazon. All of them are technical, and I had to code on a white board for each one of them. They also asked some small questions along with the coding questions for each one of them. Most of them are pretty easy. They said I should get a response within a week, but I didn't, so I emailed them after 1.5 weeks. Then they rejected me and didn't really tell me a reason. I thought I did pretty well. All the interviewers are nice and the experience was pretty good. Seattle is indeed a nice city. I just wish I had gotten the offer.
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.
