I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2011
Interview
A recruiter contacted me via email.
I chose a day where I could fly to Seattle and attend a day long interview process (There were 4 interviews, each 45 minutes long).
Before the interviews started, we had an informal lunch with some of their employees.
All of the interviewers were nice except one. The interviewer (some manager - which is even more shocking) then became so unprofessional to the point that I felt like yelling at him and leaving the room. Thankfully, there was at least one professional in the room (i.e. me) and I kept working at the problem till he finally got out.
Was given a set of fields. Was asked to figure out the best data structure to store this data in the form of a list and at any given point, retrieve the first 5 (decreasing order) of field values.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.