I applied through college or university. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Amazon (Vancouver, BC) in Feb 2013
Interview
I applied at a job fair. I was contacted within a week for the position of Software Development Engineer at Amazon Vancouver. There were no recruiter screening interviews. The recruiter got in touch with me over email and scheduled a phone interview. I had to reschedule the interview because I wasn't well the day before the interview. There was no problem with that. They did send a pdf file containing information on what to expect in the interview. Essentially, the document said you should be prepared to answer programming problems, algorithms, data structures, distributed systems, databases, networks and operating systems.
The recruiter was nice and prompt in responding to emails and inquiries. However, the phone interview itself was a very unpleasant experience. I don't know what kind of phones were used but I had difficulty in hearing the interviewer and he seemed to get annoyed by it. He ruined my overall experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The questions in the first round were fairly straightforward if you use data structures like trees and linked lists for your work regularly. If you're working in areas where you don't use those data structures regularly, you may find the problems challenging. The question I was asked was "Given a sorted linked list, create a binary tree with the array with minimum height." Note that the question specified only binary tree and not binary search tree.
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