I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2013
Interview
I was approached by a recruiter who then sent my resume over to the Hiring dept. They were prompt and scheduled the interview within a week.
There were 4 technical rounds and 1 with HR. All the interviewees were personable and friendly. A lot of the questions involved coding. They walked me through many of the problems and asked questions as I was coding. They wanted to understand my thought process. If I strayed or did something wrong, they'd ask questions to indicate it. Fairly standard questions on algorithms. Definitely prepare for graph, tree algorithms, data structures and be prepared to justify a choice for a data structure. The interviewers didn't particularly care about syntax, but they want to see that you are comfortable putting pen to paper.
Also be prepared with atleast 5-6 questions you want to ask them. I ran out of these and it became awkward towards the end!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a large web-based, highly scalable, highly available system. This was an open-ended question. You should make sure to ask the interviewer lots of questions to narrow down the problem before jumping into a solution.
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.
