I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2020
Interview
I applied online. Got reached out to by a recruiter, had an initial call and then an online assessment. Standard Leetcode questions, nothing too difficult.
Got to a virtual onsite and this is where things unfortunately did not go very well. One interview with system design and three standard Leetcode question interviews. Nailed the first three interviews, but absolutely failed the last one. Not because I didn't understand the question, but the interviewer's accent was so thick I literally could not even understand the specifications of the problem, especially over Chime (Amazon's version of Zoom). On top of that his 5 year old son was literally screaming in the background and actually came onto the screen multiple times until I had to ask for his son to leave because now I could not only understand him, but I couldn't hear him either. Needless to say, I did not leave a good impression on the interviewer and I was not in the least surprised that they decided not to extend an offer.
Probably an unfortunate reality of interviewing during the pandemic, he might have been easier to understand in person and without the kid running around.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard Leetcode technical questions. Nothing unexpected or
Definitely prepare for Amazon Principles questions, though, since each interviewer will ask you a few and will drill down so it is difficult to make stuff up on the spot.
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