I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2010
Interview
I have had two interviews with Amazon recently, within a span of 20 days, both over the phone. These were mostly technical interviews. The first interview started with the interviewer asking me to explain what I am working on and why I am interested in a position with Amazon. After I described my work and interests briefly, he started to ask technical questions. To start with, the questions were on time complexity of various data structures (arrays, vectors, linked lists, hashes) for accessing/inserting/deleting an item. Then he asked me a question about the difference between a thread and a process and some multi-threading concepts such as shared resources and semaphores. Finally the focus shifted to algorithms and the questions were mainly on finding the most frequent word(s) in a large file and efficient algorithms to do so. In the end he asked me to code up a program in my preferred language (C) to find the second maximum element in an array in linear time. I submitted the code by the end of the day. In summary, the interview went pretty good and I received an invitation for a second interview within a week.
The second interview also started in a similar way as the first one except that the person interviewing me gave a slightly better description of the kind of work in the position I was being interviewed for. Without spending too much time on this though, he started with technical questions by first asking me about what languages and platforms I used for programming. He then asked a few questions about efficient ways to merge sorted sub-arrays into one large sorted array (merge sort) followed by a hash-table question involving chaining to overcome collisions. I felt the second one was a bit more trickier than the first one and waiting for their decision so far.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
How do you avoid collisions when multiple keys map to same hash value.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.