The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jul 2010
Interview
Had 2 phone interviews, one of them had questions on algorithms and the other on Datastructures and coding.
Was called for 1:1 interviews at their Seattle dev center. The first one was about designing concepts and classes, and also UI for the Kindle. Free form discussion mostly.
Second interview was with the prospective manager. Somehow this was what went wrong. We just did not understand each other and the questions were on things like "How would you work with someone who is not doing any work and has no interest in doing the work assigned to him" etc. One technical question after that which I found answerable but got confused midway even though I had the idea right.
Last 3 interviews were all technical and the experience was very positive.
They did not make me an offer. I believe the one with the manager was the make or break one and I screwed it up bad.
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.
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.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.