The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in May 2012
Interview
It was a walk in interview. Amazon picked me up from Linkedin and sent me an invite for the interview. Interview consisted of 4 1:1 technical rounds of 45 mins each. The interviewers were very nice and smart. The questions that I was asked weren't very hard but I believe to get an offer from Amazon you have to impress all of the interviewers because I am pretty sure I impressed all but 1 and hence did not get an offer. But well it was a very good experience. One learns more from failures than from success:)
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
A situation question and asked to design and write a code to achieve the goal. You are a TV company who uses certain amount of bandwidth every day. You have to tell your bandwidth provider how much BW you will need for the following day based on the anticipated usage of BW the other day. Describe the DS used and write a program to determine the amount of BW needed for next day.
Architect question. Given a list of schools in a district and a Head quarter (HQ), design infrastructure needed such that all schools can add and query student data and HQ has access to data from all schools. Also internet connection in the schools is not very reliable and some schools are in disaster prone areas. You have to secure the data.
A nXm matrix of characters. Write a program to create all possible words from each element. That is, a[0][0] with a[0][1], a[1][0], a[1][1] and with all the adjacent elements of each element. Feed each word to the dictionary and if valid, print it.
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.