I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Toronto, ON) in Jul 2012
Interview
Applied online and heard from a recruiter within 3 hours. They had an upcoming interviewing drive. The recruiter discussed with me the position in the Toronto office on the phone to asses my suitability. Afterwards I was invited for an in-person technical interview for the following week.
The interview included four 1-on-1 sessions. Three of which were technical, one of which was more traditional HR (with the group's hiring manager).
The first technical interview was the standard stuff about binary search trees and hashing.
The second one (bar raiser) had a question about path finding in a grid-maze with obstacles.
Third interview had some questions regarding string manipulation in C and finding pairs that sum to k in an unsorted integer array.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Finding a path in a maze which is represented by a grid of characters.
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.
