I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2014
Interview
I gave a recruiter my resume at my university's career fair and got an email about 2 weeks later inviting me to an on-site interview in Seattle. I was really surprised that I didn't have any phone interviews, not even an initial phone screen before being invited on-site (nobody from Amazon called me at all). I live in California, so going to the campus wasn't just a drive away.
At my on-site interview, we were put into groups of 3 to complete a mini programming project that was supposedly based on problems that real Amazon engineers consider (but to a much smaller scale). Each project is independently done. That's what we worked on for the whole day, and throughout the day, you would get pulled out for short interviews mostly explaining what you're doing on the project and related things. Nothing really behavioral or technical. The interviewers were friendly and helpful. Afterwards, all the interviewees went into a room for some panel discussion and questions.
Overall, I had a good experience on-site, but it was very different from what I expected or have experienced before. One thing though, it's been over a month since I submitted my reimbursements and still haven't gotten a reimbursement or update.
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
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2026
Interview
Recruiter reached out and set up an onsite loop after the initial steps. Four back to back rounds in one day. Two coding heavy rounds run by senior engineers, one round with the hiring manager, and one behavioral round with a bar raiser. Mix of leadership principles and data structures throughout. Heard back within a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard BFS grid problem. Given a grid, find the time for all cells to reach a target state where the spread happens one layer at a time.
How did you answer: Clarified the constraints, walked through the approach, then coded a clean BFS from all starting points at once. Tracked the number of layers until everything was covered.