I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Vancouver, BC) in Jun 2013
Interview
Received an offer for a interview from a recruiter. First phone interview with a lady that had less experience than me. Second interview with a junior developer with less experience (and guessing even programming knowledge) than me. They did not seem happy with C# 4.0 syntax. I had to rewrite my answers in C++ syntax. I had not worked with binary trees since university but I was able to answer the questions. No idea why they did not select me for a onsite interview. However, I don't care I was not sure if I was going to put up with they crazy 8 hrs on site interview, and also I was not very interested as they pay is the same as other smaller companies, the pressure is way higher and I prefer to have balanced life outside work.
Overall, after taking to my friend (ex-amazon programmer) too little reward for the trouble. Employees do not even have free Prime.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
No one, they were all fairly simple. Questions related to binary trees and linked lists.
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.