I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Amazon (Bengaluru) in Mar 2013
Interview
I was asked to attend an online coding test in InterviewStreet that had 4 questions to be solved in 2hrs. I solved 2 of them and was short-listed for f2f interview next week.
I attended interview 1st Round. The interviewer was very knowledgeable and he asked me algorithm questions. I was unable to answer properly and thus eliminated after the 1st Round.
Great learning experience and would prepare well to get into it in future.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you efficiently store a million strings in a data structure so that you would give suggestions if a part of word is typed?
For eg: let there be 5 words cat, ball, basket,banana,bench.
If I type b it should suggest me ball,basket,banana,bench
If I type ba it should suggest me ball,basket,banana
If I type ban it should suggest me banana
..........................
You should show how you store the data, how you then retrieve them to give user a proper suggestion and do this efficiently.
It's exactly same as the dictionary app we use.
The other 2 questions were also challenging.
One was some sorting question that I don't remember but it was an easy one and the other was to how would I structure a TreeMap in java assuming that it doesn't exist in the Collections library.
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