I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2013
Interview
Amazon contacted me after receiving my resume through a conference database. They asked me to complete a 90 minute online coding assessment, where I was asked 3 different (relatively simple) coding problems (eg determine whether or not a LinkedList contains a loop). A little over a week later I heard back from HR saying that I had been selected to go to Seattle for an onsite interview.
The interview started at 11:45, and we were first brought into a room where we had lunch and casually talked to employees about Amazon and living in Seattle (there were about 30 of us, all students looking for post-graduation entry-level positions). Then we each were assigned an interviewer and brought to a small room with a whiteboard where I had 45 minutes to first talk about a project I had worked on/experience I'd had in school or internships. Then I was given a coding problem that I had to solve on the whiteboard. After I was finished, I had some time to ask questions of my own. There were four interviews just like this in total, in which I stayed in my room and interviewers came in and out. Two of my interviewers were very nice and helpful if I got stuck, one of them was kind of uncomfortable because I was confused about the problem and was struggling a little bit, and the other one seemed to really dislike me, looking at me like I was an idiot every time I said something or wrote something (he also tried to trip me up by saying that it was necessary to manually resize an ArrayList in Java, which I knew wasn't the case but it got me a little flustered and he told me I need to do some more research after the interview). That particular interviewer was stressful, but the other three didn't seem to want me to fail.
Overall I think that the people there were pretty nice, although maybe a little bit pretentious, but it is Amazon so I suppose they have a right to be, since many many people want to work there and they have the ability to select the best of the best candidates. It was also a little weird after the interview, since my last interviewer walked me to the lobby and left and there was no further discussion or convening. I also wish they had been courteous enough to give me a call telling me I did not get the job rather than sending me an email.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Give an example of a project where you failed.
Design a program that would select which elevator in a building would be the most efficient, based on where the elevator is located and headed and where the user is located and headed.
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.