I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2012
Interview
I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter who noticed my resume on monster. I had one phone interview of about 90mins and was then asked to come to Seattle. I was apparently interviewing for 2 position so I met 2 hiring managers and about 2 technical people from each of their teams, 6 interviews in all. The technical interviews were nothing special, the standard questions listed here and a couple of curve balls which were really interesting and I cannot disclose them since they were sort of closely related to what they do and thus it would go against my non-disclosure agreement. They treat you really well and make you feel comfortable except when they keep challenging your answer to see if you break :)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The most difficult and unexpected question was a bunch of "What if" and "An example of when..." kind of behavioral questions. I should have prepared these, I had not and really was stumped and ended up giving them real examples and expressed my honest opinions (not a good idea esp if you are opinionated like me).
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.
