I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2012
Interview
Applied online, emailed me back after a couple of months. I took an online assessment, then they flew me out for an on-site interview. The interview lasted about 3 hours and consisted of 4-5 people.
Questions:
-Given two arrays of integers, find matches.
-Find path in tree that sums up to desired value, first complete path, then partial path.
-Head to tail problem - given a word (such as head) and a target word (such as tail) find if a path of words exists from source word to target word where each step is a new word created by changing one letter in the previous step. (head->heal->teal->tell->tall->tail)
-Given a square array of letters, find all english words in the left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and north-east directions.
-Convert integer to roman numeral
I choked on more than one.. mostly due to pressure I think. Walking back to the hotel, I thought of many better answers.
As far as the company goes, lots of young people, lots of dogs, really cool building, and relaxed atmosphere. Seattle is a great city, and it seemed like a nice place to work.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The head to tail problem was rather difficult for me... first I created a function to generate all words created by changing one letter of a word, then I mentioned doing iterative deepening DFS. Probably should have gone with A* search, with number of different letters as the heuristic... maybe keep a list of explored words to avoid duplicates.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2012
Interview
Did not apply. got a cal from a recruiter. they had got my resume from my university career website. asked me my available data out of two given. no initial phone interview. called onsite. grueling day starts at 9am ends at 5.30 pm. just one coding problem for the whole day to solve with your group of candidates,
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Just one problem to solve for the whole day with a group of candidates.