I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2011
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter based on my LinkedIn profile who set me up for a phone interview. There were 2 rounds of phone interviews after which I was invited to their Seattle office for an onsite. Recruiters and HR staff were very prompt about letting me know the results of my interviews. After the initial interview, I was notified within 24 hours of their interest in moving forward.
The onsite consisted of five 1:1 interviews including lunch with the manager. The manager asked me an interview question while eating lunch which was not the most pleasant experience. It was obvious he was ambitious and driven but did not have the best social skills. Some interviewers were friendly and encouraging while others were not.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Describe an algorithm to find pythagorean triplets given an array of n integers.
Assume you are given 2 words, an initial word and destination word, (valid based on the English dictionary) containing the same number of letters. You are allowed to only change 1 letter at a time. Describe a an algorithm to find the shortest path (shortest number of letter changes) to get from the initial word to the destination word.
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Calgary, AB) in Jun 2026
Interview
Online Assessment is the first step in the process. I didn’t have an HR phone screening and went straight to the OA after applying. It was sent to me about a week after I submitted my application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first question is LeetCode style algorithms question, and the second question gives a full stack repo (choice of Java, NodeJS, or Django) and asks to solve a backend issue which is causing a bug in the frontend. Unit tests must pass to pass the second question. You can run both backend/frontend indivdually or together
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2026
Interview
Recruiter reached out and set up an onsite loop after the initial steps. Four back to back rounds in one day. Two coding heavy rounds run by senior engineers, one round with the hiring manager, and one behavioral round with a bar raiser. Mix of leadership principles and data structures throughout. Heard back within a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard BFS grid problem. Given a grid, find the time for all cells to reach a target state where the spread happens one layer at a time.
How did you answer: Clarified the constraints, walked through the approach, then coded a clean BFS from all starting points at once. Tracked the number of layers until everything was covered.