I applied through other source. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Bengaluru) in Jun 2012
Interview
I appeared for a codesprint at interviewstreet.com for Amazon India. I could solve 4 out 4 problems. I was given two emails to send my resume to. One of them bounced and from the other I got no response. On reminder, I got out of office reply. I asked the manager mentioned in the out of office reply for updates. There was no response from him either. This process took a month. I demanded an explanation about this behavior from interviewstreet. Immediately they swung into action and the manager from Amazon replied saying that I should receive a call from HR. I got a call from Chennai HR, saying that the Bangalore HR will be call me up and schedule an interview. No response for the next 7 days, suddenly another HR person wakes up and contacts interviewstreet saying that he missed the email. I reply saying that I had been called by a HR personnel who has informed me that an interview will be scheduled with Bangalore team. More than a month no communication from Amazon side - not even a email saying that my experience does not seem to be relevant, or looks inadequate or that they have no more requirements as of now. Just to put things in perspective, I hold MTech degree in CSE from IIT and have 4 years of experience in the industry. Overall, my experience about the interview process has been not just negative but disappointing. I was interested in Amazon, as they do some work in interesting topics like machine learning, NLP etc but with this experience, I would never like to work with them.
Loop — 4 rounds, all on the same day
Round 1 — Coding (DSA)
Interviewer was a senior SDE, very friendly.
Warm-up + behavioral: "Tell me about a time you took ownership of something outside your responsibilities."
Main question: Given a list of meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms required. I used a heap. He then asked a follow-up: what if meetings could be reassigned to minimize total idle time? We discussed approaches but didn't fully code it.
He cared a lot about how I talked through edge cases out loud.
Round 2 — Coding + Problem Solving
LP question: "Describe a situation where you disagreed with a teammate."
Coding: LRU Cache implementation from scratch. I used a hashmap + doubly linked list. He pushed on thread-safety and what happens at capacity 0.
Round 3 — Behavioral (Bar Raiser)
This was the toughest round — no coding, all Leadership Principles, very deep STAR-format probing.
Questions I got:
"Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned."
"A time you had to deliver something with a tight deadline and limited information."
The bar raiser kept drilling: "What was your specific contribution?" "What would you do differently?" "What data did you use?" Have 6–8 strong stories ready with metrics.
Round 4 — Low-Level Design
Design: Design a parking lot system (classes, vehicle types, spot allocation, pricing). Then he asked me to code the findSpot() and releaseSpot() methods.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most coding questions were LeetCode Medium. Common themes: graphs, heaps, sliding window, hashmaps, and LRU/design., system design,
Great interview process with three rounds, including a technical assessment and a technical interview. The interviewers were professional and supportive throughout the process. The questions mainly focused on DSA, problem-solving, and core technical concepts. The discussions were engaging and provided a good opportunity to demonstrate technical skills. Overall, the process was well-structured, smooth, transparent, and a very positive experience.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Amazon (Dublín, Dublín)
Interview
Online techincal assessment. Had to screen share and complete basic coding tasks similar to Leet Code. Could choose a language of your choice. Overall a very fair system and judged based on merit.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical assessment so a basic leet code style question about reversing the orders of long numerical strings.
