The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Ashburn, VA) in Jun 2009
Interview
I received my call for employment opportunity with Amazon and within week i had my first round. The interview was straight forward, with questions around Algorithms/Data Structures and basic bit operation. Really simple.
Questions were.
1. Given an array with n integers from 1 to n-1, one number is a duplicate, find the duplicate number.
2. given 8-bits give range of signed and unsigned integer values possible.
and some other similar questions.
Was later asked to submit a coding question, implemented in any OO language suited.
The question was to design a deck of cards, with shuffle and deal a card functions to be necessarily included.
Now i'm awaiting my second round to be held this week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Also, given a large list of stars, with they're co-ordinates, give a smaller number of closest stars, to earth, with earth as origin, and the best and most optimum way to do this.
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