I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon (Redmond, WA) in Oct 2025
Interview
For the embedded C role I interviewing for, there is the initial interview, in which you have to answer two coding questions, provide working code in C/C++. The interview time allocated was 45 minutes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Problem Statement:
Given a byte array in network byte order, write an algorithm to find the starting bit position of the first occurrence of the 32-bit, big-endian pattern (0xFE6B2840) in the byte array.
The pattern may or may not be byte aligned in the input.
The function htonl() and ntohl() are provided in the C library to convert the endian order from host to network order, and from network to host order respectively:
uint32_t htonl(uint32_t hostlong);
uint32_t ntohl(uint32_t netlong);
Note: network byte order is big-endian, host byte order is little-endian.
Signature of function to implement:
int findPattern(const uint32_t numBytes, const uint8_t data[])
Description of function parameters:
Input parameters:
uint32_t numBytes - The number of bytes in the array named 'data'
uint8_t data[] - The byte stream of data to search
Return:
-1: if the given pattern (0xFE6B2840) is not found.
-2: if the inputData is Null or the size of the 'data' is insufficient to find the pattern (0xFE6B2840).
Otherwise, the pattern is found. Return the starting bit position of the pattern (0xFE6B2840).
Example 1 - Byte Aligned:
Inputs:
numBytes: 8
data: { 0x00, 0x01, 0xFE, 0x6B, 0x28, 0x40, 0x02, 0x03 }
Starting position is here at bit 16
Returns: 16
Example 2 - Non-byte Aligned:
Image 2:
This is the same as example 1, left-shifted by 1 bit!
Inputs:
numBytes: 8
data: { 0x00, 0x03, 0xFC, 0xD6, 0x50, 0x80, 0x04, 0x06 }
Starting position is here at bit 15
(least significant bit of the second byte of the input)
Returns: 15
string question like in the YouTube amazon interview video , and c fundamental question , memory allocations, pointers, sizeof,
that was the first stage if you pass there is 5 interviews
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Irvine, CA) in Sep 2022
Interview
Had to complete a leetcode exercise to get my foot through the door. I had about 2 hours to complete two problems related to bit manipulation and array organization.
Afterwards I got contacted by an internal recruiter. The process was a bit messy, schedules kept changing and they kept asking me to accommodate. The recruiter sent me a rundown of things to prepare for the night before the actual interview. As the title suggests, I interviewed for Embedded Software, so most of the topics in the resource covered embedded concepts (bit manipulation, addressing, thread safety, protocols). None of the questions asked by the interviewers covered my title even remotely. Majority had to do with algorithms for a generic software engineering role, so there was an obvious mismatch there.
The interviews were split over two days. One day, met with 4 different people each mostly asking about generic STARS questions and ending the interview with a question about algorithms. Only one interview was with the team lead and actually focused on the job title.
Overall it was a complete mess. I felt blindsided by the lack of focus on their end and it was exhausting to go through a gauntlet back to back.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Name a time you had issues with a co-worker and how did you resolve it?