I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
I began with a phone screen, then received an invitation for an on-site interview. There were - technically - 6 interviews; one with HR, 4 technical, and one with the manager I would be working for over lunch. The process took about 4 hours in total (45 minutes per interview, with HR being short).
The phone screen was fairly simple and short (about half an hour), and the on-site had much more interesting questions; only one was what I would consider a 'staple' coding question that it would be likely to have come across in another interview (I actually had used it a couple times when I was interviewing others in the past). The emphasis in the interviews seemed primarily about optimization and refinement - while the questions were not (for the most part) that difficult, the interviewers strongly pushed at improving solutions, catching edge cases, and fixing bugs, rather than implementing difficult or esoteric algorithms.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One of the interviewers (not the 'bar-raiser') asked a very open ended question about how to design a specific system in a way that could effectively and efficiently scale to meet Amazon's needs.
Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
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
