I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2011
Interview
Two phone screens, arranged fast within a week of each other.
1st screen: Find intersection of two arrays, Questions on OOD, Design a parking lot
2nd screen (much harder): Design an object model for arithmetic expressions, Find largest palindrome in a string
On-site arranged in 2.5 weeks. Downtown location/building was nice but offices looked very generic but employees looked very energetic and involved. 1-1 interviews with whiteboard coding with 5 people.
Questions such as: Find number in an array repeated an odd number of times, How to sort 100 million 10-bit numbers, Design a restaurant reservation system, Spiral print a 2-D array, Design and implement the Boggle word game, Given a reference to a node in a BST find the immediate predecessor.
Overall, a great company and a great opportunity for any SDE candidate. Very high energy, would be great for people looking for a start-up environment with the backing of a large well known company.
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.
Um teste de código online, se aprovado, vai para o loop. O loop é 4 entrevistas seguidas, duas em inglês e duas em português. 3 entrevistas técnicas de código, todas as 4 têm pergunta de liderança.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pergunta historicas baseada nos principios de lideranca da amazon.