I applied online. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Nov 2009
Interview
It was through the company's HR division that I got the phone interview call. Because of unforseen circumstances, I had to reschedule and this was done fairly quickly.
I was interviewed by one of the tech leads and initially I was asked questions about projects on my resume. Following that the person asked various questions about the details of Java, such as "how is the Java garbage collection implemented?" Since I was not familiar with the implementation details of the garbage collector and only knew about the general working of it, I really couldn't answer that.
Also, I was asked questions about data structures, which if you hadn't seen before, you wouldn't be able to piece together the answer anyway.
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