I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2012
Interview
I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter who noticed my resume on monster. I had one phone interview of about 90mins and was then asked to come to Seattle. I was apparently interviewing for 2 position so I met 2 hiring managers and about 2 technical people from each of their teams, 6 interviews in all. The technical interviews were nothing special, the standard questions listed here and a couple of curve balls which were really interesting and I cannot disclose them since they were sort of closely related to what they do and thus it would go against my non-disclosure agreement. They treat you really well and make you feel comfortable except when they keep challenging your answer to see if you break :)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The most difficult and unexpected question was a bunch of "What if" and "An example of when..." kind of behavioral questions. I should have prepared these, I had not and really was stumped and ended up giving them real examples and expressed my honest opinions (not a good idea esp if you are opinionated like me).
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.