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.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Herndon, VA) in May 2013
Interview
Submitted a resume online and heard back from Amazon within a few days. They asked me to provide some times that I'd be available for a phone interview. The process was very quick and I was interviewing within a week of submitting my resume.
The phone interview was pretty straightforward. I talked to a current engineer at the company and answered a few technical questions that he had for me. Most of the questions were pretty standard tech interview questions like you'd find in all of those tech-interview preparation books. I answered the first two questions correctly pretty easily, and the third one very quickly. He then extended the third question to make it harder, and that took me a bit longer. All coding was done using a site where he could see the code that I was typing in real time. I was allowed to write in whatever language I wanted to. After finishing the technical questions I was able to ask him a few questions about the company culture, the area, etc. He seemed to be very happy with what he was doing.
My phone interview was on a monday and I heard back that wednesday that they wanted me to fly to Herndon for an in person interview. They asked for some information about dates/expected salaray/references and got back to me about a week later with a time for me to fly in. They paid for the flight and hotel and everything and the process was very nice.
The in person interview day was long but fun. You stay in the same room all day. I met with 2 hiring managers, 2 coders, and had 1 phone call with a guy in Seattle. The questions were primarily technical but there were a few personal questions as well. Make sure to study up on their leadership principles and whatnot. The technical questions were challenging but doable, nothing too unexpected. The people I talked to seemed to really like the job, and it was a very good experience over all.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The technical questions weren't that hard, but they asked a lot of questions like "name a time when you strongly disagreed with someone in your past. How did you resolve it?" Those questions are harder to prepare for.
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.
