I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in May 2011
Interview
Applied through employee referral. Got email from HR recruiter. Two phone screens which were fairly easy and then five onsite interviews; hard enough to sweat. Questions were focused on algorithms. Prepare everything: career cup, PIE. Don't really know what they expect.
Phone screen 1:
Basics of data structures like stacks, queues, hash tables.
Code: check whether a given string is palindrome or not.
Follow up: Find all substrings in a string that are palindromic.
Phone screen 2:
concepts of operating systems: deadlock, threads v processes
Code: A number between [0-N] is missing in an array of [0-N-1]. Find the missing number.
Design: Poker game.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Given a log file containing (User_Id, URL, Timestamp) user can navigate page from one to the other. Find the three page subset sequence repeated maximum number of times. Records are sorted by Timestamp.
Bar raiser
Given a NumberPool containing number sequence of numbers from 1 to infinity. Implement an interface, essentially two functions-
checkin(N): which adds number to the number pool and makes it available.
checkout(): returns minimum number from the pool and makes it unavailable.
Bar raiser
1. Given array of numbers, find a, b, c such that a + b = c. Can you beat O(N**2) ?
2. Difference between Quick sort and Merge sort. What modifications you make in Quick sort so that it provides O(N lg N) worst case complexity.
Given a set of numbers, partition the set in to two, such that sum of all the candidates in first subset = sum of all the candidate numbers in second subset.
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.