I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Phila, PA) in Feb 2016
Interview
10 minutes for behavioural questions and 35 minutes for coding question. Behaviral questions including why Amazon, what is your most challenging project and how do you cooperate with teammates, etc.
Given N ropes of lengths L1, L2, L3, L4, …, LN. I had to join every rope to get a final rope of length L1 + L2 + … + LN.
However, I can join only two ropes at a time and the cost of joining the two ropes is L1 + L2. I was supposed to join ropes in such a way that the cost is minimum.
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