I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Amazon (New York, NY) in Jun 2017
Interview
I was contacted by Amazon recruiter over the email for their hiring event in New York City. I applied at Amazon before and recruiter came across to my profile in their database. After sharing my updated resume, I was informed that my profile has been selected to move forward. Next I received an email invitation to participate in an ‘online technical challenge’. It was 90 minutes coding challenge and I had to solve two coding problems. I was able to solve the first problem successfully but run short on time to complete the second one.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Both the coding challenge were Functional Programming problems .
1. There were set of rules given in the problem statement. You have to process array of input, do some calculations accordingly to return the sum.
2. There were few conditions given in the problem statement. You have to process two array string input and return the result after comparing the values.
The technical round focused on a DSA problem about finding the closest points to the origin, where I was asked to explore multiple approaches like sorting, heaps, and quickselect. It felt straightforward, and I was ready for it thanks to the time I spent on PracHub brushing up on similar questions. The interview also included a behavioral section, but overall, I found the process to be very easy. Happy to say I received an offer, which I gladly accepted!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
K Closest Points to Origin - given an array of points on the 2D plane and an integer k, return the k closest points to the origin (0,0). Walk through sort-by-distance O(n log n), heap-based O(n log k), and quickselect O(n) average; discuss when to prefer each based on the relationship between n and k.
Tough interview.
The Process: Automated Online Assessment (OA) with 2 coding questions and a system simulation, followed by a 4-round virtual Loop. Every single round started with 20 minutes of intense, behavioral behavioral questions diving into Amazon's Leadership Principles, followed by 25 minutes of technical coding or system design.
Amazon interviews are a test of mental endurance because you have to switch from deep behavioral storytelling straight into complex coding which can be so difficult. I used Apex Interviewer to practice the cognitive context switch. Running through their live-coding workspace helped me ensure my technical communication and architectural structures remained sharp and automatic, even after spending the first half of the interview defending my past project metrics. I fed the practice AI questions I extracted from glassdoor and gothamloop.
In the end, the offer was way lower than I hoped.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design the backend inventory tracking and placement service for a global fulfillment network, ensuring strict transactional consistency across multiple regional warehouses during peak shopping events.
Initial screening call with recruiter followed by a 1 hr hacker rank question on DSA. The final round was a panel consisting of 4 interviews ranging from technical design, more DSA and behaviour questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a time when you disagreed with your team and how you resolved it
