I applied through college or university. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2012
Interview
I had 3 in-person interviews, each with a different rep, and one by phone. One of the interviews focused on OO design and DB design. The second focused on Data structures and the third one on simple coding questions and recursion. This was for a fresh-out-of-college software engineer, so the level of difficulty wasn't so high, certainly nowhere near the legendary insane questions Google or MS are known to ask. I did well on those three interviews, but not so well on the phone one (more coding questions). My impression was that each interviewer then casts a vote, since I was given an offer despite my poor performance on the last interview. I wasn't asked to go to Seattle for interviews.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Design (in Object Oriented manner) a restaurant reservation service. No coding necessary beyond class names and method names and rough description of how they work. Then design the SQL database for this system (table names, columns and foreign keys)
Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
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.
Um teste de código online, se aprovado, vai para o loop. O loop é 4 entrevistas seguidas, duas em inglês e duas em português. 3 entrevistas técnicas de código, todas as 4 têm pergunta de liderança.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pergunta historicas baseada nos principios de lideranca da amazon.
