I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2012
Interview
I applied using the university system and the interview was scheduled through that.
There seemed to be some problems with email communication since I would occasionally fail to receive emails that were sent to applicants.
There were a lot of interviews on campus (I think they interviewed at least 50 people within 2 days) so everything was well-automated. The format was 2 back-to-back 45 minute 1-1 interviews with developers from different teams.
In general, I would recommend brushing up on basic algorithms and also reading up on Amazon services, especially all the web and cloud systems.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Serialize (flatten) and de-serialize a binary tree. First describe the approach, then write the code.
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.
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