I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (San Francisco, CA) in Aug 2015
Interview
The entire process toke 1.5 month, but it mainly because of the coordinator the recruiter had been working with left the company. The experience of the phone screen was not that great, I have never been able to have a good experience to have the interview with a guy who is not a developer but trying to ask technical question, because some of the time they ask nonsense questions and when you are trying to tell them that the question should be asked in a different way, they lost his temper.
BTW, I think the worst thing the interviewer did was when I got the code exercise question, I was able to explain my idea before writing the code, he stopped me right away saying do not talk to him unless I have any question about the code exercise, I think this kind of behavior somehow makes me think he is not the right person I should work with or work for.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Coding exercise:
Input in a file. >4GB
10, 20, 30 , 10, 55, 20, 66, 77, 55, 88, 55...... 4GB
output format:
10 - 2 times
20 - 2 times
55 - 3 times
The technical round focused on a DSA problem about finding the closest points to the origin, where I was asked to explore multiple approaches like sorting, heaps, and quickselect. It felt straightforward, and I was ready for it thanks to the time I spent on PracHub brushing up on similar questions. The interview also included a behavioral section, but overall, I found the process to be very easy. Happy to say I received an offer, which I gladly accepted!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
K Closest Points to Origin - given an array of points on the 2D plane and an integer k, return the k closest points to the origin (0,0). Walk through sort-by-distance O(n log n), heap-based O(n log k), and quickselect O(n) average; discuss when to prefer each based on the relationship between n and k.
Tough interview.
The Process: Automated Online Assessment (OA) with 2 coding questions and a system simulation, followed by a 4-round virtual Loop. Every single round started with 20 minutes of intense, behavioral behavioral questions diving into Amazon's Leadership Principles, followed by 25 minutes of technical coding or system design.
Amazon interviews are a test of mental endurance because you have to switch from deep behavioral storytelling straight into complex coding which can be so difficult. I used Apex Interviewer to practice the cognitive context switch. Running through their live-coding workspace helped me ensure my technical communication and architectural structures remained sharp and automatic, even after spending the first half of the interview defending my past project metrics. I fed the practice AI questions I extracted from glassdoor and gothamloop.
In the end, the offer was way lower than I hoped.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design the backend inventory tracking and placement service for a global fulfillment network, ensuring strict transactional consistency across multiple regional warehouses during peak shopping events.
Initial screening call with recruiter followed by a 1 hr hacker rank question on DSA. The final round was a panel consisting of 4 interviews ranging from technical design, more DSA and behaviour questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a time when you disagreed with your team and how you resolved it
