Amazon Software Development Engineer interview questions

Submitted resume via an old boss who currently works at Amazon. After about 3 weeks, got a call from the recruiter for an initial phone screen the next week. Phone screen took an hour and involved highly technical questions with no real non-technical questions other than "Why do you want to work at Amazon?" Two days later, the recruiter called back and asked to schedule another phone screen. This happened the following week. Format was very similar to the first one - All technical questions and a few questions about my experience. Two days after the 2nd phone screen, received an email stating they'd like to fly me up for an on-site interview. Fly up to Seattle day before the interview, and got to look around the town. The actual on site interview process consisted of 5 developer interviews that were about 45 minutes each. These interviews were heavily white-board based and involved high level design questions, low level coding questions, and debugging / support process questions. Interviewers all seemed very relaxed and informal. They did not seem so much about trying to find gaps in your knowledge / wrong answers as they were about pushing you towards the limits of what you knew and then seeing how you dealt with questions that you did not immediately know the answer to. One of the 5 developer interviews was the bar-raiser, who's purpose at Amazon is ensuring that you're smart and a good fit for Amazon as a company. Many of the questions in this interview were more high level asking about design patterns, and language specifications. While the interview definitely was more difficult than the others, it did not feel overly aggressive or negative. In addition to the developer interviews, there was lunch with the hiring manager and a 15 minute interview with the recruiter. The lunch was an opportunity to ask more about Amazon and the team. Recruiter interview was to discuss benefits, salary, and total compensation. After the on site interview, I received a call within 2 days from the recruiter with the initial offer.

First emailed on September 15, 2009. Rejected by email on October, 15 2009. I had three phone interviews with the Customer Returns area and the Ops area. The first interview was with a younger, male developer. It had a "get to know you" section and two technical questions: Find the first common element in two sets (implement the code), and design the objects needed to run a jukebox. The second interview was with a senior male developer. It also had a "get to know you" section and two technical questions: Given a time-ordered log of user visits to web pages find the most common 3-page sequence (implement the code), and design a poker application. The third interview was with a foreign, younger female developer. She jumped right into the technical questions which were: Find the deepest common ancestor of two nodes in a tree structure (implement the code), and layout the fundamental objects to build a restaurant reservation system. This was probably the worst interview of the lot because it felt like the interviewer didn't understand the language (C++) she had asked me to write in even though I could easily have done it in several others. The biggest takeaways here were that the questions were all canned and could be looked up, the coding would have better been managed by text instead of over the phone, and there was very little feedback on how my answers were. In general, there were gaps of more than a week in which I heard nothing at all and given no insight as to why, the interviewers seemed to take notes but only the last one seemed to have read them. Overall, the whole thing was just a long, drawn-out mess, and a waste of a month. I'm lucky enough to be currently employed or I would be irate about how slow the process was. When I interviewed with several other companies (including Microsoft) a couple years ago the longest it took was a week including on-site interviews. It just seemed like Amazon had a complete disregard for my time.