Amazon.com Software Development Engineer Intern Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated Feb 13, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 29 ratings 
“Average” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 29 ratings
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| 1–10 of 29 Amazon.com Interviews | Sort by |
Software Development Engineering Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Feb 13, 2012
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 (took 4 weeks)
What you would expect from a technical interview by Amazon. Questions regarding algorithms,data structures, and coding concepts.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Skills Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Feb 6, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in Seattle, WA (took 1+ week)
Contacted for a phone interview that took place a week after initial contact. Phone interview consisted of two 45-min technical interviews back to back. Questions consisted of algorithm designs, OOP principles, and basic screening questions. Both interviewers were very nice and helpful.
First interview: I had to find out if two numbers in a given array summed to a given value x. OOP question was to design a hierarchy for a furniture store.
Second interview: I honestly forget my technical question, but the OOP question was to design a hierarchy and methods for an Airport.
I received an offer two days after my phone interviews, and accepted a week later. Very good total package including relocation, discount, and extremely competitive salary. I also was told I can rank the "organization" i would like to work with (Kindle, AWS, etc) but have not received my official assignment yet.
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
N/A
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
View Comments (4)
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Jan 30, 2012 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in Seattle, WA (took 3 weeks)
I applied for an internship at Amazon for last summer and they contacted me this past November to set up an interview in January. I believe they kept my application to be reconsidered once I was a junior in college. I had two 45-minute interviews on the phone, separated by a 15 minute break.
During the first interview, the interviewer asked me first to talk a little about myself since he had not read my resume yet. He was very kind and understanding. He told me to write a program that reverses the words in a sentence string. I wrote it in Java and read him back the code when I had finished. While I was writing the code, he asked me to talk through my logic and explain what I was doing. He was more concerned with the algorithm than the actual semantics and he said it wasn't a problem if I forgot some of the names of the java functions on strings, etc. Often, when I noted something important for the problem, he'd say it "sounds reasonable" or "makes sense to me." He was very reassuring and it was nice to talk with him on the work we did. After I finished the code, he asked about what kinds of strings I might use to test this and he also asked me to consider how the program might be improved, e.g. how the program would handle a semi-colon. Also, he asked me to evaluate computational and memory complexity in terms of the number of characters in the string. At the end he asked if I had any questions, and I didn't really have any at that time.
The second interview consisted of a couple more questions, and the interviewer was female. She asked me to go to a code sharing website so she could see the program I wrote. First, she had me write a program that compares if two binary trees are equal. I wrote it in Java. She was also very helpful, and helped me figure out an issue if I was a little stuck. Many of the methods I called were hypothetical, in a sense, using a previous java implementation of a binary tree I had implemented as a reference. After I completed that task, she asked me to explain the difference between an array and a linked list and when you might use either one. At the end, I asked her about the male:female ratio at Amazon and what her experience has been, being a female, as I attend a women's college.
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
No negotiation on the offer; it is a very good one.
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Feb 9, 2012 — 0 of 1 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in Seattle, WA (took 2 weeks)
1.Given 2 binary trees, how would you check whether they have the same structure.
2. What happens when a collision occurs in a hash table?
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Jan 27, 2012 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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1.0
Very Easy Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Received and Declined Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 (took 5 days)
After contacting by a recruiter, he set up two 45 minute phone interviews for me.
They are just like two technical interviews.
(1) Both interviewers are from India and they all got strong accent, especially the second one. I have a hard time in understanding their words.
(2) One of the interviewer refused to use an online editor together even I suggest it. He actually ask me to write a "complete" java codes on a paper first and then read "every letter" to him line by line. Seriously? Some how I believe he wanted to waste our time, why? Anyway, I only have to answer two problems.
(3) Following (2), I believe the second question he threw to me was both an algorithm but also a brain-teaser one, which I don't like. I ask him for hint but he refuse to disclose the optimal answer (I will post question below).
(4) The other interviewer, he asked all tech coding problems, which are mostly short and intuitive. But after answering five questions correctly and quickly. We still have about 15 minutes left and then we chatted until the end. I think this is good sign for me because it means that I'm doing well. But honestly I prefer someone push me to the limit and give me a compensation then based on my skill level. I feel that I was treated like a under but actually I'm almost complete my PhD. Other company send manager / PhD to beat me (everyone can be beaten eventually), but somehow I think the interviews are too easy so that I don't think they will gauge my skill level clearly. Thus, I an worry that they would NOT give me a PhD-level pay. (Probably I apply for the wrong position)
Anyway the overall feeling is okay. The question are all coding & problem solving types. No O/S questions or DB questions.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Jan 16, 2012 — 2 of 2 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 (took 2 weeks)
Two phone interviews, each one 45 minutes long with 15 minute break in between.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Jan 18, 2012
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 in Seattle, WA (took a day)
I was contacted four months after applying online by email, and they selected an hour and a half block from my provided list of time I had available. The interview consisted of two 45 minute phone interviews, one after the other with a 15 minute break in between the two. Both interviewers were very personable even over the phone and kept a good pace with the interview. They both spoke highly of their jobs, Seattle and the company, but couldn't tell me what they worked on specifically other than they both worked on the Kindle.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Jan 3, 2012 — 2 of 2 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 in Seattle, WA (took a day)
The interview consisted of two 45-min phone interviews. There was a 15 minute break planned to break up the two phone sessions. I got the first call right at the scheduled time.
There were a few basic technical questions that didn't involve much thinking (ex. "What is a binary tree?") and a behavioral question ("tell me about a time you made a mistake and what lessons did you learn?"). After that, the interviewer got to the main technical question("Given two nodes in a binary tree, how would you find the shortest traversal path between them?"). I used all the rest of my interview working through this and also went through the 15 minute break. I eventually started getting a call on the other line from the second interviewer and had to end the first. I did give a solution that would work, but didn't have any time to optimize, debug, etc.
The second interviewer first asked me to rate my proficiency (1-5) in several programming languages. He then asked a few easy technical questions ("Describe Hash Maps"). This involved me explaining what a hash function is, what it is used for, where data is stored, etc. All questions after that were followups on hash maps. ("write a 'put' function", "Are there any problems that can occur in a hash map (collision questions)?", "what are different ways of dealing with collisions?", etc etc).
I did much better on the second interview since I'm much more experienced at using and implementing hash maps than trees.
The interview was on a Thursday, I received an official offer about a week later.
I studied algorithms (searches, sorts, merges, etc) data structures (trees, hashes, arrays, strings, etc) and many practice problems intensely for about 3 weeks straight for this interview and it definitely helped a ton! Made me more confident and refreshed things I hadn't used in a while.
Both interviewers were nice, polite, helpful, and easy to talk to. Overall it was a pretty great experience.(although I'm a little biased since I got an offer =D )
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
no negotiating an intern program, but the offer seems pretty fair to me.
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Background Check.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Jan 10, 2012
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in Seattle, WA (took a day)
I applied for the position before christmas, and got the letter 3rd of january that i have 2 phone interviews 10th of january. So i didn't have a lot of time to study. The first interview was really good, basic questions about the work experience, projects. After that there were technical questions. Like when do we use arrays and when do we use linked lists. Couple of other theoretical questions. Then the interviewer asked how to find if there are numbers that repeat in an array. I had to give three different solutions before we came to the one that has the best order complexity. So my advice is to study the big O notation. Then she asked how to reverse a singly linked list. i gave the answer.
The second interview was more difficult for me, because i didn't study BSTs at all, i focused completely on hash tables. But the guy asked of how to find repeated characters in a string, so i had to give 2 solutions. One was less space consuming but more time consuming, the other one was the opposite. but apparently there was one solution that was perfect, didn't get it. The other question was about printing the BST in level order. Couldn't do it... but overall both interviewers were polite and helpful, so i guess studying the data structure book is very helpful.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Engineer Intern at Amazon.com
Posted Nov 22, 2011 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Nov 2011 (took a day)
Received phone interview request through recruiter. Had two back to back 45min each phone interviews. calls came on time and interviewers were nice and friendly. Went straight to technical question with only 1 personal question.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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