I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2013
Interview
Initial contact was made through a recruiting agency, not Amazon itself. There was a technical screening (90 minute coding problem, not solvable given the time constraints). Following this, was a trip to the Seattle campus for 4 hours of 1 on 1 interviews. I found the campus trip to be exhausting, and a little bit un personal. Each interview was about 45minutes of technical / leadership questions. There did not seem to be much time for interpersonal and workplace culture interaction.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
tell me about a time when you disagreed with a teams decision and what did you do about it.
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.