Amazon.com Interview Questions & Reviews

I won't give away the questions asked, as that would violate the NDA I signed. (Because I might actually want to work there some time down the road...)

But I will say this: Almost every coding and design question asked has been posted on Glassdoor. While I am a very experience programmer, I recognized long before the interview process, that I would need to put in some long hours preparing for this company. I spent a lot of time spent refreshing myself on data structures and applying that to problem solving. I went through like fifty Amazon programming questions posted here. I copied each one down, and made a note of the number of times an equivalent variation of that question was posted. Then I made sure I could solve each one with my own code. Extra attention given to the problems posted multiple times.

Prior to my interview, I had heard from many friends who interviewed at Amazon that they were asked at least one question involving a hash table. Amazon is famous for asking questions about hash tables. Either they ask about the hash table constructs in various programming languages (like Java and Perl, hash vs. map, etc..), or a coding problem where the hash table affords an O(N) or O(1) solution. So if you are asked a question that involves looking up a value in one array and searching for a corresponding value in the same or other array - the answer likely involves "use a hash table".

Also, Amazon quizzes candidates on their ability to recognize runtime ordering of the coding solutions. So know your "big-O" notation (e.g. O(N), O(N lg N), polynomial, exponential, etc...)

Describe a project you are working, tell me how would you scale the application to handle large data.

Design elevator system with classes/ methods

What happens when a URL is typed into the address bar of the browser? explain how DNS works?

How would you find the common primes in two integers ?

Merge two sorted linked lists with unique integers.

All technical questions had to do with scalability. All management questions had to with estimating/reporting time to finish.

Check if 2 binary trees are equal

Collision in hash table

Give me a sentence, and print the sentence reversely.
ex. input "he is a boy", output"boy a is he"

did you work with SQL and Excel on previous jobs?

Which number is bigger: 5/6, 3/4, 4/7, 4/9, or 9/11

Tell me what you know about Audiable?

Tell me about your customer service experience. Give a example of your call centre experience with your previous employers.

Tell what online customer experience do you have in relation to e-commerce?

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Given stream of numbers, how do you choose one number at random.