Amazon Software Engineer interview questions

1) You get contacted by phone by the recruiter. We discussed the usual: my past experience, why do I wanna work for them, and stuff like that. 2) If the recruiter thinks you are suitable for the job, he sends a link to solve a timed exercise. I don't remember the problem buy it was mid difficulty. Something to do with magic numbers and arrays. 3) I suspected they do not look at the solution, if the code passes the unit tests when you submit it, you are still on track, otherwise it ends here. 4) They offered to interview me in person in Santiago, Chile. If you do not live in the city, they pay for the plane ticket to get there. The technical interview consisted in 4 stages, each step with two developers and 45 minutes each, 2 were about solving algorithms in the whiteboard and 2 were a systems design question. I'll post the questions I remember. I thought I did pretty well in 3/4 and the last one I struggled too much to solve it. I did not get an offer, it seems their decision has to be unanimous for a candidate to get an offer. I have to say that the devs were very nice and if you get stuck they help you get back on track (I suppose this is not good for you though in terms of points) I put negative experience because I felt that if this was not for Amazon, I would had got an offer for sure. And let's face it, they are not NASA or something like that to only be targeting geniuses. Maybe I just did not fit their expected dev profile.

One manager started talking about high level business perspective and their clients' and stuff (I am not sure why coder who focuses on bug fixing or new feature development should worry about that). Then he asked me to write down class implementation on the whiteboard. I told him that I will be writing using PHP. He asked: "Does PHP have classes? Last time I used it, it was PHP version 3 and it didn't have classes". Wow, they guy missed the whole trend of web industry for the last 10 years! Another manager asked me how I would deal with increasing web traffic and he started drawing load balancer on the whiteboard (to me load balancer seems more related to infrastructure engineer than to developer but whatever). I told him that I would rewrite the code using NodeJS speeding up application 10 times using asynchronized paradigm. He didn't know what NodeJS was. Another interviewer who was developer said that they used Java at Amazon but he personally preferred to use C++. Well, again, C++ appeared decades ago. Within last 5-10 years so many new technologies were developed that Amazon seemingly missed.