I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Sep 2014
Interview
I missed a hiring event earlier in the week, but a friend referred me to a recruiter that contacted him earlier last month. I emailed her and had a brief conversation to ask what I'm currently doing at my job and why I'm looking to leave. Afterwards, she set me up with a 90-minute remote interview using collabedit.com. She recommended using www.topcoder.com and www.careercup.com to prepare for the interview.
Almost a week later, I had the phone/ coding interview:
1. Find the intersection of two arrays
a. What's the time and space complexity?
b. Can you improve performance? i.e. What if arrays were sorted?
c. Which sort would you choose?
d. What if provided and unknown number of arrays?
2. Given a binary search tree, write a method to add a new node to the tree (without re-structuring)
P.S. I heard from a fellow Amazon friend that they are changing up the interview process, so I'm not sure if this is what it's moving to since he said that he had 2 45-minute interviews before proceeding to the on-site interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What's your favorite programming language and why?
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
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2026
Interview
Recruiter reached out and set up an onsite loop after the initial steps. Four back to back rounds in one day. Two coding heavy rounds run by senior engineers, one round with the hiring manager, and one behavioral round with a bar raiser. Mix of leadership principles and data structures throughout. Heard back within a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard BFS grid problem. Given a grid, find the time for all cells to reach a target state where the spread happens one layer at a time.
How did you answer: Clarified the constraints, walked through the approach, then coded a clean BFS from all starting points at once. Tracked the number of layers until everything was covered.