I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon in Nov 2012
Interview
Contacted by company recruiter via LinkedIn.
Scheduled for a 1 hour interview. The information was very complete and the schedules were flexible.
The interviewer called on time. Briefly introduced myself and went on to the problem solving. In the end I was allowed to ask him some questions.
The overall process was smooth, except that the interviewer has a strong accent and talked very fast. I had to verify with him 3 times to fully understand the problem. I could hardly pick up what he was saying for the most of the time.
He gave me a problem and I only can come up with a brute-force solution.
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.