I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2013
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter for FBA team and asked me to fly in for onsite interview.
On the day of the interview, I was taken to a room and said whole of my interview process will be dealt in the same room.
First interview was with the director of the team. Basic questions on string, but I was very much surprised by the authoritative manner expressed by him. He was not ready to hear what I tried to explain nor tried to understand. So in the mid of interview process I almost lost interest. I was not given time to rewrite the code, as we mostly don't get optimized solution at first go. I did (int)c - 97 to get the ascii value of a character from a to z and mapping it to 0-25, which took him by surprise and asked why i dint use toascii.
Second interview was with some manager. It was an easy question. though i coded it, i din come up with a solution which is common as it dint strike me. It was my fault. and there was a design question, but not enough time.
Third interview was with senior developer. It was a system design question. It went pretty well. I was able to answer and come up with solutions.
Fourth interview was with a developer. This guy also showed his attitude. Though the question was pretty simple, I made an error which i immediately rectified. Also I must say got a nervous.
It was 3 hours long interview with no break in middle except for water or coffee.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There was no unexpected or difficult Question.
1. Find the first non repetitive character in a character stream.
2. Check for prime number and Elevator system design.
3. Agent bidding system design
4. Find for subtree within a larger tree.
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.
