I applied through other source. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2012
Interview
I was contacted by Amazon from linkedin. They want to know if I am interested to go to sydney for their hiring event. I said I can't go to sydney because I live in Brisbane and told them that my strength is in .Net and Amazon does not hire .Net programmer but she told me that it is ok. So I accepted to have the normal method of interview.
We had a few emails back and forth and the lady from Amazon was quick to respond my emails (usually a few hours). First step was a coding exercise. Usually initial coding exercises are easy and are designed to see if the interviewee can write code at all.
So she sent me the question and I had three hours to finish it. The question was: given an array of ints, find the sum of most common repeated number. For example {4,2,3,1,8,3} should return 3+3 = 6. I had to give two answers one with least time complexity and one with least space complexity. So I implemented the typical answers using a hashmap, or the naive one with O(1) space complexity and one extra using sort.
I unit tested and documented all my code properly, also had time to write a performance test and document how to parallelize any of the algorithms.
Its been a while since I sent them the answer but I received no response. The lady who was quick to reply to my emails also did not reply to my follow up email! It is really disrespectful, asking someone to sit for a test and totally ignoring him after that! Even if my code have been terrible and the guy has had a heart attack after seeing it they could tell me that sorry, we don't want to go further! It wasn't me chasing them after all.
After about a week and two follow ups, I have been said that they were trying to contact me trough another email. However I scheduled a phone interview and fingers crossed on that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of int, find sum of the most common int.
Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
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
