I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Boston, MA) in Dec 2011
Interview
This was a recruiting drive. I was contacted by email and asked if I wanted to participate in a recruiting drive in Boston. I had 4 hour long interviews one right after the other at a hotel. Amazon had rented out a suit of conference rooms for the event. The interviewers were pleasant, and seem to have a set of questions (or types of question) that they asked. Each interviewer seem to focus on different things. The interview process was very STAR (situation, task, action, result) oriented. Look this up in the web, it's worth it.
After the question, you were given a problem to work on. The problems are not difficult, just take your time and talk it out. Talking through the problem is really important since it can save you from going down the wrong path.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
There was nothing especially difficult. I'm not allowed to discuss the specific problems but I will give some general answers. There were a couple of cute problems, but mainly the problems were related to searching some space. I had 2 problems that required breadth first searches. A problem which looked more difficult than it was. This is probably the hardest type of problem, because it requires that you think about it and play with it until you see the simple solution. Think out loud, this is important.
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.
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.