I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in May 2012
Interview
I had three phone interviews. No onsite. First one went really well, second one was so so, third one (decider) did not go well. Here were my questions spread over all three interviews (that I remember):
1) Return the nth fibonacci number
2) Asked me some basic OO questions (interface, abstraction, OO)
3) Write isBalanced(String str), which returns true or false for whether or not the string has properly matched and balanced parentheses
4) Design a parking lot system
5) Design a chess system.
I wasn't feeling it with the interviewer in the second and third interview. When you get stuck, stay position. Keep talking about what you're thinking. Keep engage. Try to stay relaxed and a solution will come to you.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most questions were posted here on Glassdoor. Just go through and create a list of common questions. Study seriously for a month if you can.
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