I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Phoenix, AZ)
Interview
I applied online through the Amazon careers site. I was contacted by a recruiter.
Amazon flew some of their engineers out to Phoenix and interviewed candidates at a hotel.
I had two interviews in a hotel room. The first was pretty reasonable, asked me to implement a singleton and write the code on a whiteboard. The whiteboard was not especially large so it was difficult to fit all the code, especially since I tend to write some code, notice that I forgot something, go back and add a line, etc.
The second interview was strange because the interviewer asked me two coding questions and then seemed to be working on his computer while I wrote each answer on the whiteboard. At first I thought maybe he was copying down my code but he did a lot more typing than I did scribbling. He also didn't seem to pay any attention to what I was doing until I finished writing and explained what I had done. Seemed rude and a waste of everyone's time (especially considering I drove 2 hours each way to the interview). We could have achieved the same result by having me just submit answers via email. For the second question, I couldn't fit the entire answer on the whiteboard so I had to erase and continue. By the time I had finished the scribbling exercise there wasn't time to improve my algorithm or discuss anything.
I wasn't too disappointed when I didn't get an offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Do a deep copy of a linked list in which each item, in addition to the normal "next" pointer has a random pointer to another item in the list.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.