The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2009
Interview
Submitted resume via an old boss who currently works at Amazon.
After about 3 weeks, got a call from the recruiter for an initial phone screen the next week. Phone screen took an hour and involved highly technical questions with no real non-technical questions other than "Why do you want to work at Amazon?"
Two days later, the recruiter called back and asked to schedule another phone screen. This happened the following week. Format was very similar to the first one - All technical questions and a few questions about my experience.
Two days after the 2nd phone screen, received an email stating they'd like to fly me up for an on-site interview. Fly up to Seattle day before the interview, and got to look around the town.
The actual on site interview process consisted of 5 developer interviews that were about 45 minutes each. These interviews were heavily white-board based and involved high level design questions, low level coding questions, and debugging / support process questions. Interviewers all seemed very relaxed and informal. They did not seem so much about trying to find gaps in your knowledge / wrong answers as they were about pushing you towards the limits of what you knew and then seeing how you dealt with questions that you did not immediately know the answer to.
One of the 5 developer interviews was the bar-raiser, who's purpose at Amazon is ensuring that you're smart and a good fit for Amazon as a company. Many of the questions in this interview were more high level asking about design patterns, and language specifications. While the interview definitely was more difficult than the others, it did not feel overly aggressive or negative.
In addition to the developer interviews, there was lunch with the hiring manager and a 15 minute interview with the recruiter. The lunch was an opportunity to ask more about Amazon and the team. Recruiter interview was to discuss benefits, salary, and total compensation.
After the on site interview, I received a call within 2 days from the recruiter with the initial offer.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Write a function that takes two strings A & B as arguments. Return a boolean that indicates if A is a substring of B. Explain the various test cases you would run on the function.
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