I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jul 2010
Interview
My interview experience starting with a visit to the career fair at my school. Amazon got right to business by asking me how to solve two coding questions on a high level and writing some pseudo-code on the back of my resume. After this, they told me they would get back to me in a couple of days on whether or not they were still interested in me.
Two days later, I got an email from the recruiter that they were interesting in moving forward with my application and would like to move forward with my application. I was invited to a HQ interview in Seattle. I was informed that I would be apart of a group-project interview where I would be randomly assigned to work with 2 other candidates on a day long project.
Fast forward to the interview day: upon arriving at Amazon at around 9am, I and all the other candidates were placed into a room where we listened to presentations from current employees and were given the opportunity to ask questions about the culture, their lives, etc...After this, we were split up into groups, the project was revealed to us, and we set off to work. I can not go into the details of the project or anything, but be prepared to do real coding if you are selected for this type of interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you code up a custom rectangle detector?
Great interview process with three rounds, including a technical assessment and a technical interview. The interviewers were professional and supportive throughout the process. The questions mainly focused on DSA, problem-solving, and core technical concepts. The discussions were engaging and provided a good opportunity to demonstrate technical skills. Overall, the process was well-structured, smooth, transparent, and a very positive experience.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Amazon (Dublin, Dublin)
Interview
Online techincal assessment. Had to screen share and complete basic coding tasks similar to Leet Code. Could choose a language of your choice. Overall a very fair system and judged based on merit.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical assessment so a basic leet code style question about reversing the orders of long numerical strings.
Loop — 4 rounds, all on the same day
Round 1 — Coding (DSA)
Interviewer was a senior SDE, very friendly.
Warm-up + behavioral: "Tell me about a time you took ownership of something outside your responsibilities."
Main question: Given a list of meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms required. I used a heap. He then asked a follow-up: what if meetings could be reassigned to minimize total idle time? We discussed approaches but didn't fully code it.
He cared a lot about how I talked through edge cases out loud.
Round 2 — Coding + Problem Solving
LP question: "Describe a situation where you disagreed with a teammate."
Coding: LRU Cache implementation from scratch. I used a hashmap + doubly linked list. He pushed on thread-safety and what happens at capacity 0.
Round 3 — Behavioral (Bar Raiser)
This was the toughest round — no coding, all Leadership Principles, very deep STAR-format probing.
Questions I got:
"Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned."
"A time you had to deliver something with a tight deadline and limited information."
The bar raiser kept drilling: "What was your specific contribution?" "What would you do differently?" "What data did you use?" Have 6–8 strong stories ready with metrics.
Round 4 — Low-Level Design
Design: Design a parking lot system (classes, vehicle types, spot allocation, pricing). Then he asked me to code the findSpot() and releaseSpot() methods.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most coding questions were LeetCode Medium. Common themes: graphs, heaps, sliding window, hashmaps, and LRU/design., system design,
