The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
I had 2 phone interviews with Amazon. I was invited to in-person interview after the first one that lasted about 2 hours. Couldn't go to Seattle at that time, so I declined. Recently, I had interviewed over the phone/online coding again. Haven't heard back yet, perhaps it's not been long enough. I feel their phone and online interview is a fair game for entry level position, consisting mostly of testing of general knowledge of data structures and algorithms. Trees, hash tables, list, algorithms used on them. I felt the interviews were testing knowledge of this subject matter mostly and questions were how to optimize/improve the algorithm also. Nothing too tricky or unusual. They didn't care which language one would use either.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.