Amazon.com Software Engineer 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...)

How to find non-identical numbers in a given two List in C++ & write program ( with syntax)

Given of stream of data in 3 dimentional , how to find million positions in billion points (x,y,z) at any given point (a,b,c)

Design a system for reservations at a restaurant.

Reverse SList, Elevator design, bfs/dfs, BST

Array of integers. Store duplicates in the order of their first occurrence.

Design parking system.

Given English dictionary, find the longest word that can be created using the symbols of the chemical elements.

Design a parking lot system.

SQL queries

Was given a set of fields. Was asked to figure out the best data structure to store this data in the form of a list and at any given point, retrieve the first 5 (decreasing order) of field values.

Binary search (using recursion)

Find out if two binary trees are equal

What would you change about the Amazon website and why?

Which sorting algorithm would be good for sorting small-sized integer arrays and why? What is the performance? What about for large-sized integer arrays?

Give pseudocode over phone and code on a shared screen how to scramble an array of integers in random order. Then optimize it for better performance.

Write a program to check of a binary tree is a binary search tree.

Phone interview 1:
1. Describe what a hash map/table is. Later evolved into how to deal with collisions.

2. Write the code to take an int array and return a new int array whose value at i is the product of all values in the input array except the value at i.

Phone Interview 2:
1. Count the number of words in a sentence.
After more definition, the problem evolved into:
Code a function that will take a String and return the number of words (continuous sequences of non white-space characters).
2. How would you model a restaurant reservation system?

In-House interview:
1. Given two int arrays, return a third int array that contains all values in the first int array that aren't in the 2nd. If a value is duplicated in the first int array, only return it once in the output array.

2. Model a deck of cards

In-house Interview
1. Write a program to print all combinations of ascending numbers that equal an input number.
2. Given a million points on a graph, return the 100 closest to the origin

In House Interview
1. Write an algorithm to solve a maze
2. Standard "what's a problem you faced and how did you solve it" type questions...

Distribute numbers starting from 1 to infinite, give out minimum number available and take in already given numbers.

Words representation of number.

Design File system