I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2012
Interview
Contacted via in-house recruiter. They were having a recruitment day in my area, so I went straight to the 1:1 interviews.
There were four interviews (three with managers and one with another SDE). The schedule for the way went: interview 1, interview 2, short talk with HR, short break, interview 3, interview 4.
The questions ranged from OO design to data structures. As usual, I had to give the {run,space}time complexity of each solution. After answering most questions, I had to describe how I would scale it up to Amazon.com-size.
I received a phone call 2 business days later. They informed me that they weren't moving forward with me. I appreciated the phone call... rather than receiving a generic email.
Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
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.
Um teste de código online, se aprovado, vai para o loop. O loop é 4 entrevistas seguidas, duas em inglês e duas em português. 3 entrevistas técnicas de código, todas as 4 têm pergunta de liderança.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pergunta historicas baseada nos principios de lideranca da amazon.
