I applied online. The process took 6 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jul 2013
Interview
Started with a phone interview. The phone interview was pretty basic string manipulation and I used a shared Google Doc to write code in.
Passed the phone interview and moved onto the on-site interview in Seattle. Met with 5 different people for 1 on 1 interviews (including a lunch). Most questions were technical.
Most questions were about algorithms and data structures. Was asked to implement A* path finding, traveling BST, spatial partitioning structure, and some "riddle" like algorithms were a specific answer was needed.
There was 1 individual that didn't really pay attention and they seemed more interested on their laptop.
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.