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.
I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Dec 2012
Interview
I applied to amazon months before until they actually contacted me. Im assuming they do seasonal recruiting since i applied near the summer into fall and i get contacted in the winter.
I had 2 phone interviews. Both interviewers were very nice and helped when they thought it was necessary in order for you to succeed. The first phone interview was not difficult if you read all the questions on glassdoor that people posted and read the cracking interview book that somone did suggest in the intervews tab list. The book was extremely helpful. the second interview was majority coding questions and at the end of each coding question the interviewer would ask time complexities. After I ended the phone interview i thought to myself i made like 4 mistakes answering the first question and knew i was doomed from that point on. I received the generic rejection letter one week after the second phone interview.
the interview process for me lasted roughly a month because i interviewed right before the christmas vacation
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
first interview had like 5 or 6 short questions followed by a coding question which was
sum of 2 numbers within one array adds up to a target number which you have as a parameter fairly easy question if you read all the interviews questions on glassdoor.
second phone interview had 2 questions
the first one was a find the kth node in a linkedlist and the second was to check a string for "(" and ")" and there are only so many combinations that are considered valid and invalid. Valid is if all the "(" have an ending ")" for example , (( )) or ()()
Invalid would be )()( or ((()
if the string starts with ) its automatically invalid.
second interviewer asked time complexities on both of the question.
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.