I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in May 2011
Interview
Posted resume on Dice, contacted by their recruiter to set up phone screen. Their engineer called on time. Asked a few technical questions. First briefly went through my background. First question was how do we use MVC model in previous project. Interviewer does not have strong telecom experience, so had to explain to them in details. Second question was about inheritance and composition, explained to him as IS/HAS relationship. Was asked which one is better, I told me it depends on the system that you want to model, not one better than the other. Also was asked to provide real life example from previous project, instead of fake examples. Not sure how he takes my answer. Third question was to come up with algorithm to find intersection of two linked list. Interviewer was patient to guide through the thinking process, but still a pain. Came up one basic solution, then he asked for alternative solution to improve the performance. Gave him something like searching for sub-string. Don't know how he like it or not. Had brief conversation with him about their interview process is better for fresh graduate student rather than experienced engineer. He said Amazone is hiring for the whole company rather than specific group.
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.