I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (New York, NY) in Oct 2013
Interview
I was originally contacted by a recruiter through LinkedIn. After responding I was able to set up an appointment. Amazon was conducting a series of interviews in NYC which lasted about half a day. There were 5 interviewers (including HR) and the interview process and questions were almost identical to those defined in Cracking the Coding Interview. This was my first interview in 7 years and I have to say they did a great job of making me feel comfortable during the process. My previous experiences weren't all that great.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most of the questions weren't all that difficult and there was very little pressure in solving them. The point was really to see the process of arriving at your answer. The most difficult question was to explain the cardinality of depth first and breadth first search and explain how the algorithms could be written. I actually missed that one as I haven't looked at a text book in years. The question I remembered most was the one about having 2 eggs and dropping them off a 100 story building to determine at what floor they begin to break. What is the least amount of attempts required to determine this answer?
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.