I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2014
Interview
A complete waste of time going onsite! Got a mail from the recruiter for a "Group-coding" challenge for the SDE position. The challenge starts at 10 in the morning after a brief about the company. The problem was about scheduling ads using Amabot where the problem divides into 3 1. Scheduling, 2. Validation, 3. Optimization. It took about an hour to decide the who takes what and understanding the problem was really hard although the API was given.
Then came a discussion with the developers about the problem and that lasted for half an hour; noon over. Two hours later another discussion about the problem where I found out that I had made a mistake in the logic. Bid adieu for my hopes in the evening.
An advice to the fellow interviewees: Please avoid this format of interviews as this does not completely reflect the kind of problem solving capability and opt for one on one where an interaction will make the problems to be understood.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Choose any of the scheduling algorithms and code with the given API. Can modify it but have to finish the problem within 5 hours.
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.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Calgary, AB) in Jun 2026
Interview
Online Assessment is the first step in the process. I didn’t have an HR phone screening and went straight to the OA after applying. It was sent to me about a week after I submitted my application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first question is LeetCode style algorithms question, and the second question gives a full stack repo (choice of Java, NodeJS, or Django) and asks to solve a backend issue which is causing a bug in the frontend. Unit tests must pass to pass the second question. You can run both backend/frontend indivdually or together
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2026
Interview
Recruiter reached out and set up an onsite loop after the initial steps. Four back to back rounds in one day. Two coding heavy rounds run by senior engineers, one round with the hiring manager, and one behavioral round with a bar raiser. Mix of leadership principles and data structures throughout. Heard back within a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard BFS grid problem. Given a grid, find the time for all cells to reach a target state where the spread happens one layer at a time.
How did you answer: Clarified the constraints, walked through the approach, then coded a clean BFS from all starting points at once. Tracked the number of layers until everything was covered.