I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2011
Interview
2 rounds of phone interviews, then 6 on-site.
Standard tech interview questions: binary trees, string parsing. Lots of discussion of memory management, performance, managed vs unmanaged code. Whiteboard coding of course.
I ended up in a conference room where the interviewers came to me... this means that there were no breaks in between, so it ended up being rather rapid-fire and I wasn't thinking as clearly by the end of the day. All the interviewers were really nice though and would have been good coworkers.
Amazon seems like a fast-moving company with a lot of cool stuff happening. They're getting big but they haven't realized it yet... they need to grow up a bit and realize that working people to the bone is not sustainable nor does it produce good long-term results. They offer a lot of money but it's not so mind-blowing once you figure in healthcare costs, no annual bonus, etc. Lots of stock in the compensation, so your comp is strongly dependent on how you think the stock will do. At a P/E of > 100 (as of 12/11), there's not a lot of headroom there.
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.