I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Amazon (Bengaluru) in Mar 2013
Interview
I was asked to attend an online coding test in InterviewStreet that had 4 questions to be solved in 2hrs. I solved 2 of them and was short-listed for f2f interview next week.
I attended interview 1st Round. The interviewer was very knowledgeable and he asked me algorithm questions. I was unable to answer properly and thus eliminated after the 1st Round.
Great learning experience and would prepare well to get into it in future.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you efficiently store a million strings in a data structure so that you would give suggestions if a part of word is typed?
For eg: let there be 5 words cat, ball, basket,banana,bench.
If I type b it should suggest me ball,basket,banana,bench
If I type ba it should suggest me ball,basket,banana
If I type ban it should suggest me banana
..........................
You should show how you store the data, how you then retrieve them to give user a proper suggestion and do this efficiently.
It's exactly same as the dictionary app we use.
The other 2 questions were also challenging.
One was some sorting question that I don't remember but it was an easy one and the other was to how would I structure a TreeMap in java assuming that it doesn't exist in the Collections library.
Loop — 4 rounds, all on the same day
Round 1 — Coding (DSA)
Interviewer was a senior SDE, very friendly.
Warm-up + behavioral: "Tell me about a time you took ownership of something outside your responsibilities."
Main question: Given a list of meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms required. I used a heap. He then asked a follow-up: what if meetings could be reassigned to minimize total idle time? We discussed approaches but didn't fully code it.
He cared a lot about how I talked through edge cases out loud.
Round 2 — Coding + Problem Solving
LP question: "Describe a situation where you disagreed with a teammate."
Coding: LRU Cache implementation from scratch. I used a hashmap + doubly linked list. He pushed on thread-safety and what happens at capacity 0.
Round 3 — Behavioral (Bar Raiser)
This was the toughest round — no coding, all Leadership Principles, very deep STAR-format probing.
Questions I got:
"Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned."
"A time you had to deliver something with a tight deadline and limited information."
The bar raiser kept drilling: "What was your specific contribution?" "What would you do differently?" "What data did you use?" Have 6–8 strong stories ready with metrics.
Round 4 — Low-Level Design
Design: Design a parking lot system (classes, vehicle types, spot allocation, pricing). Then he asked me to code the findSpot() and releaseSpot() methods.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Most coding questions were LeetCode Medium. Common themes: graphs, heaps, sliding window, hashmaps, and LRU/design., system design,
Great interview process with three rounds, including a technical assessment and a technical interview. The interviewers were professional and supportive throughout the process. The questions mainly focused on DSA, problem-solving, and core technical concepts. The discussions were engaging and provided a good opportunity to demonstrate technical skills. Overall, the process was well-structured, smooth, transparent, and a very positive experience.
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Amazon (Dublin, Dublin)
Interview
Online techincal assessment. Had to screen share and complete basic coding tasks similar to Leet Code. Could choose a language of your choice. Overall a very fair system and judged based on merit.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Technical assessment so a basic leet code style question about reversing the orders of long numerical strings.
