I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2014
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter to join an all-day group interview. During the interview day, I joined the short tour. Then we were divided into groups each has 3 people, and we have 4 groups in a room with 3 or 4 interviewers. They send out the problem description. There are 3 problems and 1 to 2 pages of description for each problem. After reading the description, each person chose the problem to solve. There is no obvious difference on the difficulty among the problems. So choose the one that you feel most comfortable to solve. If you have conflict with your teammates, I think it's the best time to show your leadership.
We had the brief lunch in the same room while coding. During the interview, an interviewer will take you to another room to have an individual talk. They mostly ask you questions about your thoughts and solutions for the problem you are doing. And sometimes they may ask your understanding of the other two problems which your teammates are working on.
My suggestion is that don't be panic about the long problem description. Talk to your teammates or interviewers to improve understanding. Start coding until you have a thorough understanding. Solution may not be perfect, but you should at least implement a brute force version and know how to optimize it.
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Other Software Development Engineer Interview Reviews for Amazon
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Calgary, AB) in Jun 2026
Interview
Online Assessment is the first step in the process. I didn’t have an HR phone screening and went straight to the OA after applying. It was sent to me about a week after I submitted my application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first question is LeetCode style algorithms question, and the second question gives a full stack repo (choice of Java, NodeJS, or Django) and asks to solve a backend issue which is causing a bug in the frontend. Unit tests must pass to pass the second question. You can run both backend/frontend indivdually or together