I applied through an employee referral. The process took 9 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jun 2011
Interview
My interview process at Amazon started when I was referred by a friend who worked there. I was then contacted by the team lead who kindly took me out to coffee and a lunch to discuss the team. To further encourage me to interview, the team lead allowed me to come in for a few hours to pair program with a couple of the developers on the team and see how their agile development process worked on a typical day.
The next step was for me to do a technical phone screen. The interviewer was very nice and asked one technical question and one design question.
The last step was the day long in-house interview which consisted of two one person interviews, two pair interviews, and a lunch interview. Half of the people who interviewed me were nice and patient, making the interview a conversation more than a grilling. However, the other half definitely made it feel like more of a grilling by becoming impatient (even turning red) when I wasn't giving a good answer.
The team lead called me personally to tell me they decided not to hire me.
Overall, I have mixed impressions from this interview. I am very grateful for the personal touch of the recruiting process and the opportunity to see the team on the inside, but I was a little taken aback by the interviewers that were a bit aggressive and frustrated when I wasn't doing well on the interview questions.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
What is the difference between arrays and linked lists?
A part of developing a good search algorithm is determining how close the query terms are to one another in a document. Develop an algorithm for finding the shortest distance between query terms in a document.
Loop — 4 rounds, all on the same day
Round 1 — Coding (DSA)
Interviewer was a senior SDE, very friendly.
Warm-up + behavioral: "Tell me about a time you took ownership of something outside your responsibilities."
Main question: Given a list of meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms required. I used a heap. He then asked a follow-up: what if meetings could be reassigned to minimize total idle time? We discussed approaches but didn't fully code it.
He cared a lot about how I talked through edge cases out loud.
Round 2 — Coding + Problem Solving
LP question: "Describe a situation where you disagreed with a teammate."
Coding: LRU Cache implementation from scratch. I used a hashmap + doubly linked list. He pushed on thread-safety and what happens at capacity 0.
Round 3 — Behavioral (Bar Raiser)
This was the toughest round — no coding, all Leadership Principles, very deep STAR-format probing.
Questions I got:
"Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned."
"A time you had to deliver something with a tight deadline and limited information."
The bar raiser kept drilling: "What was your specific contribution?" "What would you do differently?" "What data did you use?" Have 6–8 strong stories ready with metrics.
Round 4 — Low-Level Design
Design: Design a parking lot system (classes, vehicle types, spot allocation, pricing). Then he asked me to code the findSpot() and releaseSpot() methods.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most coding questions were LeetCode Medium. Common themes: graphs, heaps, sliding window, hashmaps, and LRU/design., system design,
Great interview process with three rounds, including a technical assessment and a technical interview. The interviewers were professional and supportive throughout the process. The questions mainly focused on DSA, problem-solving, and core technical concepts. The discussions were engaging and provided a good opportunity to demonstrate technical skills. Overall, the process was well-structured, smooth, transparent, and a very positive experience.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Amazon (Dublino, Dublino)
Interview
Online techincal assessment. Had to screen share and complete basic coding tasks similar to Leet Code. Could choose a language of your choice. Overall a very fair system and judged based on merit.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical assessment so a basic leet code style question about reversing the orders of long numerical strings.
