The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Aug 2011
Interview
I was contacted thru email by a recruiter and scheduled the first phone interview. It all went smooth and I got another email saying that a second phone interview has to be scheduled.
The second engineer I spoke to had a very, very bad Chinese accent. I was having trouble understanding what he was saying on the phone. I was like hearing 20% of the words he spoke and tried to fill/guess the rest of sentence. Nearly the whole interview was spent on him repeating the things he said, as I was kindly telling him that I understand nothing. About 30 minutes had passed when he successfully asked his first technical question. It was a really bad experience. I told about this to the recruiter and I was scheduled a third phone interview.
The third one was pretty much like the first one. Straight technical question. I did pretty well; analyzed the problem, thought it through, spoke out loud, came up with an efficient algorithm, checked for corner cases, commented on the running time and space complexity and mentioned other possible ways of doing it. I thought I aced it.
I sent an email to the recruiter after a week. He didn't reply. Another after a month, he didn't reply. After 3 months, I got an automated e-mail saying I was rejected. Not very positive for the HR of Amazon...
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Given an array where each element is a 2-d tuple such as (int, a percentage),
develop an algorithm which returns a weighted random number in the array where weights are the percentages.
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 (Dublin, Dublin)
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.