I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Herndon, VA) in Jul 2016
Interview
The interview process was smooth and well planned. Half my interviewers asked logical questions and were receptive to my approach/algorithm. The other half, asked unclear questions and my repeated attempts to understand the questions were met with stiff resistance. I felt like the interviewer had made up his/her mind not to hire me and was being unfriendly.
One interviewer mentioned that he worked for customer service. Assuming he was not a programmer, I answered software questions in a generic way so that a non-software engineer could understand them. At the end of the interview, I got a chance to clarify his role and he mentioned that he was a software engineer working for 'customer service' application.
Overall, I was not too impressed with the quality of the questions and the headstrong attitude of some of the interviewers.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write code to Implement a circuit board with logical gates.
Recruiter screen, online assessment, technical interviews, and behavioral rounds focused heavily on Amazon Leadership Principles. The process was structured, with a strong emphasis on problem-solving, coding skills, and examples demonstrating impact and ownership.
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