I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2011
Interview
Two phone screens, arranged fast within a week of each other.
1st screen: Find intersection of two arrays, Questions on OOD, Design a parking lot
2nd screen (much harder): Design an object model for arithmetic expressions, Find largest palindrome in a string
On-site arranged in 2.5 weeks. Downtown location/building was nice but offices looked very generic but employees looked very energetic and involved. 1-1 interviews with whiteboard coding with 5 people.
Questions such as: Find number in an array repeated an odd number of times, How to sort 100 million 10-bit numbers, Design a restaurant reservation system, Spiral print a 2-D array, Design and implement the Boggle word game, Given a reference to a node in a BST find the immediate predecessor.
Overall, a great company and a great opportunity for any SDE candidate. Very high energy, would be great for people looking for a start-up environment with the backing of a large well known company.
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
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2026
Interview
Recruiter reached out and set up an onsite loop after the initial steps. Four back to back rounds in one day. Two coding heavy rounds run by senior engineers, one round with the hiring manager, and one behavioral round with a bar raiser. Mix of leadership principles and data structures throughout. Heard back within a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard BFS grid problem. Given a grid, find the time for all cells to reach a target state where the spread happens one layer at a time.
How did you answer: Clarified the constraints, walked through the approach, then coded a clean BFS from all starting points at once. Tracked the number of layers until everything was covered.