I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon in Dec 2011
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter for a position that I applied online. She setup an interview one of the team members from Kindle organisation. He called me at the exact time and asked few question from the resume. With in couple of minute he jumped into technical questions. He asked a question and we need to tell him our initial thoughts about the problem. He ask us to improve the algorithm in terms of time complexity. The discussion goes on inorder to improve the efficiency of algorithm. Then he stops us at a point and asks us to write code in callaboration tool. he will looking at the code we are writing. They dont care about small syntax errors. After couple of days I contacted the recruiter and she said that I was not picked up for an interview. I can understand the reason, I am not that good at algorithms and data structures. So my advice would be going through all the algorithms and datastructures before you apply online. Also I would suggest to work on as many problems as yo u can, so that you can get know multiple ways of solving a problem.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How will you check to see if two integer arrays have any common elements?
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.
