I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Oct 2012
Interview
Amazon was doing on campus interviews. Had one initial interview on a Wednesday. They then invited me back for two more interviews on Thursday. This should have been three however one of the interviewers wasn't able to make it so I ended up doing a fourth interview later over the phone. All interviews were very technical in nature. They asked one or two questions about my previous experience and then started asking about data structures, object oriented programming and algorithms. All interviews were about an hour long. I heard back from them about a week after the final interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you implement a deck of cards? Pretty standard question. They will almost always ask a question of this nature.
Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
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
