Amazon.com Software Development Manager Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated May 17, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 16 ratings 
“Difficult” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 16 ratings
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| 1–10 of 16 Amazon.com Interviews | Sort by |
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted May 17, 2012
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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 Mar 2011 (took 1+ week)
rrequiter are nice and contacted me with prompt response
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted Apr 24, 2012
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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 Apr 2012 in Chennai (India) (took 2 days)
I had 2 Telephonic interviews with Amazon Chennai for SDM position.
Interview Questions
1)In a Given array which contains sorted numbers only one of number matches with that of Index. Find the number Not in O(N).
2)Derive a DataStructure to support the following operations Insert/Delete/Search/GetRandom Value in O(1) & O(logN)
Given Single LinkedList with Next and Random pointer. Write a function to duplicate this.Overall this interview lasted for 45 minutes
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted Apr 22, 2012
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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 Mar 2012 in Seattle, WA (took 6+ weeks)
Everything went well even the manager to be stated very much interested in having me on board at the very end giving every indication of an offer, only to my surprise at the last HR ended with no further explanation even after request. In every stage I was straight with every question they asked, but seemed they asked personal family and house questions in the last, could be a relocation issue but would have been decent if I was given the option to be the one deciding of relocation challenges.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted Apr 9, 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 Mar 2012 in San Francisco, CA (took 3 weeks)
I applied on LinkedIn. Next day I got email from the recruiter to schedule initial phone screening. Two days later we have our first screening. She asked me about my current role and behavioral questions on deep analysis. She asked me to describe challenges faced. After the interview, she described their hiring process, that there will be 2 phone screening and everything goes well, 1 day of in-person interviews.
Next the hiring manager called. Again it was all about behavioral questions. Questions on how I manage priorities, things I proud of, project management skills etc.
Second phone screening was done by another development manager. It was technical in nature. He asked me to describe MVC pattern. Since it was very high level question, I took an example of shopping cart and explained what will go under each M, V and C. We went in discussion around my answer. Second question was about designing a file system. This one caught me little off guard. He had created a session on a some site where we could share the session. I had type the classes and methods as I designed. This could have been a big design exercise but with limitation on the time, we wrapped up. I wasn't sure whether I gave enough details.
2 days later, I got email asking me to come in for in-person interview. I had given full day's schedule, directions, lunch options etc. It was very well planned. From the schedule, I could tell that 2-3 interviews will be technical including the bar raiser and others will be more on my management style. At the end of the day, I knew that I had done pretty good on all of my interviews and was expecting an offer.
I got my final offer in hand 1 week later.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted Mar 6, 2012 — 0 of 1 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 Declined Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in Chennai (India) (took a day)
1. 2 telephonic interviews - based on problem solving, data structures and alogrithms
2. 4 1:1 interviews -
a. system design interview
b. problem solving
c. datastructures and algorithms
d. people management
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
View Comments (1)
Inappropriate?
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted Dec 5, 2011 — 2 of 2 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 Dec 2011 in Seattle, WA (took 3 weeks)
First round: phone call with a potential peer. We mostly talked about my background and motivation. We honed in on a few behavioral questions such as "Tell me about a time when a project didn't go well."
Next round: phone call with hiring manager. Some general behavioral questions and then we dove into how to design a whisper sync like feature. Focus was on data structures, scalability and reasons why we may utilize non-relational store over a RDBMS.
Finally, I flew out to Seattle for the on-site interviews.
First meeting was with someone from HR who explained the process and gave some advice: be prepared to answer with detail and that some questions are ambiguous and will need you to get more information.
2nd was with a technical project manager. He was very energetic and positive. Things went really fast, with us starting with my background but quickly jumping off into a technology that I had worked with (over 8 years ago) and then diagraming on the board. In retrospect, I would have redirected towards a technology with which I was more familiar and described instead. A few questions about leadership, then we dove into detail around case problem where a production system was having an issue. I brought up a specific incident and we went into detail around this. The key thing they were looking for was being extremely careful w/ the production environment and mitigating the impact to the customer as much as possible.
3rd was with a SDE where we briefly went over my background but went into a design exercise on a specific feature of Amazon. I believe what they are looking for here is to understand the thought process and necessary trade-offs in the design to achieve large scale. I believe it's key to slow down and walk through your assumptions and reasons. In retrospect, I don't think I did this as well as I would have liked. I think the design was fine, but I was a bit scattered when describing it, jumping in and out of different ideas before honing in on this. In truth, my style is a bit like this where I'll sample and try a ton of ideas and think out loud, but I believe in this part, you need to slow down and proceed a bit more methodically.
4th was a lunch interview with the hiring manager, which went deeper into leadership. It was also an opportunity to ask a lot of questions about Amazon and it's culture.
Finally after lunch was the "bar raiser" who came from a different area within Amazon. There was another individual in the room who didn't ask questions but sat in. The questions largely focused on team building and management. "How do you motivate a top performer?" "Did you ever have to manage someone out of the company?"
I was very impressed with the caliber of the individuals and the passion that they had for the company and its approach. Moreover, all the interviewers were friendly and down to earth. The interview questions weren't necessarily challenging, but they were looking for depth and detail.
I just completed so no idea if an offer is coming. I am hoping that on balance they'll see the positive, but it remains to be seen.
*Edit*
Was contacted and an offer is now on the table. Tough decision now as I'm debating between two offers.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Group/Panel Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted Oct 29, 2011 — 1 of 1 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 Declined Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2011 (took 4 weeks)
The interview process consisted of being contacted by a recruiter, followed by 2 hour long telephone interviews. The phone interviews consisted of about 50 mins of questions about Software development, decision making, how to solve problems, how to hire and grow a team, and how to solve scaling problems. They also ask many questions to figure out what type of manager your are as well a the development methodologies you believe in. In the final 10 mins you can ask a few questions about the position and about Amazon.
A few days after the 2nd phone interview I was contacted and asked to setup an onsite in Seattle. I was extremely pleased with the news.
The onsite interview consisted of 5 face to face interviews with various people. I talked to other development managers, a director, and senior product managers. All in all it was a pleasant experience. Questions were diverse and not easy to answer. They covered technology, hiring, management, leading teams, making tough choices, and even system design on the whiteboard. Overall I was impressed by the process, I like to see a company that cares about the quality and character of the people they hire.
Interview Questions
Reason for Declining
My personal situation changed during the course of the interview process, this change made it almost impossible for me to relocate. The position was great and I wish I could have accepted it.
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted Oct 24, 2011 — 1 of 1 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 Oct 2011 (took 5 days)
Applied through amazon's website and got contacted by the recuirter and phone interview was setup withing 5 days. The guy called me at the scheduled time. Most questions where managerial type what-if's with 1 technical question about large string sorting. I didnt remember the bigO's and all the algorithims so somewhat fumbled it. We'll see.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted Oct 6, 2011 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Sep 2011 in Irvine, CA (took 4 weeks)
Two phone screens, one behavorial, one technical. Technical phone screen was fairly easy. About a week later was contacted for 1:1 interview in person. Was a series of 5 interviews from morning until noon. Technical interviews were challenging and thought I did fairly well. Interviews will focus very much on designing and building web services at large scale. Be prepared to answer questions on performance, caching, database optimization, design of services, etc. Behavorial interviews and management interviews were fairly easy and straightforward. Received a followup from the recruiter the following week, indicating they were not going to make an offer. Asked for their reasoning they cited concerns about my technical ability. I was a bit surprised, but also realize that I was very nervous during the first technical interview which I think was probably the problem. Got to admit I'm disappointed.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview and a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Manager at Amazon.com
Posted Sep 6, 2011 — 1 of 4 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jul 2011 (took 1+ week)
Applied online at Amazon.com and the recruiter called up a week later to setup the interview.
The Interviewer was very knowledgeable.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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