I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jul 2012
Interview
The interviewing process took about 4 weeks. There were 2 technical phone interviews followed by an on site visit that consisted of 6 technical in person interviews. They focus almost exclusively on your ability to manipulate data structures, design good object oriented code and solve basic/intermediate puzzles.
Given an arbitrary list of points and a point x, interpolate it's y value based on the two closest points to it in the list.
Given a Singly Linked List write the code to reverse it in place.
Given two Singly Linked Lists how do you find where they intersect. What if you can design the nodes? What if you can't design the nodes?
Design an in memory file/directory system. You must be able to open, modify and delete files/directories.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write the code to read in characters from a file and print out the top 10 most used. What if they are 32 bit characters? What if it's a 4GB file and you only have 1GB of ram?
If you have a binary tree and want to send it to a mobile device, how would you do it? Write the code to create the flattened tree and to recreate the tree once flattened.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.