I applied through college or university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2012
Interview
There were two rounds telephone interviews and I was selected to interview with the engineers in customer service department.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It was an extended question regarding to binary tree. The tree consists of the numbers and the mathematics operations, like +, -, *, /. The root is the operator and its two children is the numbers. The question is how to calculate the result of the whole tree. I suggested to DFS the tree to reach the bottom. But my interviewer wanted me to use another way to solve the problem. I finally use recursion to solve the problem but it consumed too much time and I even didn't have time to do the second question.
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.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
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.