I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2011
Interview
I talked to a recruiter at a career fair at my school about the position. He asked me a question about linked lists that I thought I had bombed then turned in my resume. A few days later I got an email inviting me to come out to Seattle to interview for the position.
The interview process was pretty typical. It consisted of four 45 minute interviews with four employees from a variety of different departments. The interviewers were all very approachable and made me feel comfortable throughout the process. The interviews began with a few personal questions designed to get a feel for your goals and expectations, followed by a few short answer questions about a variety of computer science topics, and then one (or more if you finish quickly) coding exercise done on a whiteboard. The questions varied in difficulty, but nothing was impossible. It was my impression that the answer is not as important as your ability to communicate your thought process to them while you're working. I got this feeling from all other places I interviewed, so it is probably a good thing to practice for an interview. You have to be able to convey your thoughts to another person in any job.
I heard within three days that they wanted to offer me a full time position for after graduation. The offer seemed very generous, though I don't have much to compare it to. They had another event a few weeks later where they flew out everybody that had an offer from them. They introduced us to several departments and gave us a pretty good feel for what it would be like to work there. They also gave us an extra night's stay in the city to explore the city. Overall, I think they did a great job of selling themselves.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Find the largest branch in a tree that is itself a binary search tree
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.