The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Los Angeles, CA) in Mar 2012
Interview
There was supposed to be two different 45 minutes interviews.
The first one called me half an hour late and was only 20 minutes
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
he asked me some java and web related questions , some I know , some I did not , some of them that I do not know was some java garbage collection related question and some sort of web cache related (different kind of cache).
The second interview was worse than the first one was a programming assignment about combing and sorting 2 different arrays , my mistake was that I asked her if she needed the repeated numbers to show or not. any way the most ridiculous part was that she hung on me about 4 times!!! and called me back again for some weird background situation that I am not aware of . she was so careless , my another stupidity was that I told her my program was not doing exactly what it was supposed to do (she asked me to sent it to her by email) , she was so careless and distracted , doubt she would have even looked at it...
any way , when she was hanging up for the last time , it was so obvious that she was unsatisfied , and I got the nice looking rejection email (after careful consideration... blah blah) , a week later
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.
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
