I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Cambridge, MA) in Jun 2015
Interview
Lengthy 5 interview 5 hour non-stop interview sessions. 7 people total. Location was had a very industrial feel to it with little air circulation. With the exception of one of the interviewers, they acted like you should be bowing to the altar of Amazon for the privilege of being there.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Lots of "tell me about a time when you...." Or "describe a time when you could have done something better...." They were very open ended and nebulous. They made you feel like a hospital patient undergoing some sort of experimental treatment as they had "interview trainees" along for the ride. The last interview was by a senior person who blew significant smoke. Lastly and most annoyingly is that they continually took "notes" on their computers as you talked.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
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.