I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2013
Interview
I was contacted by Amazon recruiter via LinkedIn for an open position in their transportation department. It took them two months (or maybe more) to schedule two phone interviews, and after that they invited me to their Seattle headquarters for the on-site interview. The on-site interview consisted of five interviews including an interview over lunch with a manager. I was interviewed by three engineers, the hiring manager, and the director.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
None. They were all easy. Standard algorithm and coding questions.
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.