The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (San Jose, CA) in Mar 2012
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter after applying through Amazon's career site. The interviewer was very friendly. Began by explaining the unit in which he worked. He then asked me to describe my background a bit which he used to segue into asking me to describe a project I have worked on, how it was implemented and what I would do to improve the project if I were to re-do that project today. He included some questions about data structures and which would be best suited for the project I had discussed. After that, he asked me to write code to determine if two strings are an anagram. He wanted me to talk through the algorithm before I began coding on collabedit. Overall he was a very nice interviewer, seemed as though he wanted me to do well - was not trying to trick me at any point.
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.