I applied through an employee referral. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Austin, TX) in Apr 2020
Interview
4.5 hour total session consisting of 4 rounds. One of the sessions was a disaster, the others were better. On the bad session, there were language difficulties with the interviewer. Most of it was intentionally vague coding challenges plus "behavioral" questions that sometimes felt like a criminal interrogation. Despite 20+ years of experience, no one asked about my past projects.
This will likely be the last time I attempt to interview with them. It's not worth the extensive prep required, all to work at a Hunger Games-like environment. I have better things to do.
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.
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.