I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Mar 2011
Interview
I submitted my resume to an Amazon recruiter during a career fair and I was contacted for an interview a couple days later. The HR person who's in touch with me always takes about a week or two before responding to any of my emails, so scheduling the interview itself was a pain. She asked me when I'd be available for the next 2 weeks, I reply right away, she replied two weeks later apologizing for missing my time and ask me for the next 2 weeks I'm available. This went on for about a month. Finally I was passed to another recruiter, who responded a lot faster and scheduled my interview within a week.
The interview itself was technical, a couple programming problems and some OOP design concepts. I was asked to code on paper while explaining my thought process on the phone, which I always find hard to do, but I thought I did okay. I didn't have any problems with the coding itself.
I was contacted for a second round of interview a week later, and scheduled the interview 2 weeks after the call. It was another technical phone interview with Java concepts and programming problems. Unfortunately, the interviewer had a thick accent and the phone connection wasn't very clear (I heard a lot of background noises from his end) so I found it hard to understand him. He asked me about how to design the system at Amazon for displaying the availability of an item; this one I couldn't answer (more detail about the question below). I was also asked if I knew scripting languages/PERL. I was asked a little bit about my school projects, if there are any challenges that I faced, and asked about what I think is the hardest course.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
How do you check if a Binary Tree is a Binary Search Tree?
Amazon has to display the availability of an item even when it's being viewed by millions of people. How would you design how this availability should be implemented so that it's as accurate as possible while being updated as quickly as possible?
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