I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Los Angeles, CA) in Feb 2013
Interview
I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter via LinkedIn. I interviewed with them previously (unsuccessfully) and looks like they had me in their database.
The recruiter told me that they have a hiring event in LA and if I am interested, I can try. Of course I was interested. I have been obsessed with this job for a very long time. I failed once, but I learned a lot since. I decided to give it a try.
The event was in three days. Sure, I read up on some algorithms, but there is not much one can do in this kind of time. What I knew would have to be enough for success or failure.
They interviewed people in the hotel in LA. You get a separate room, and interviewers walk in, and each one of them gets about 45-50 minutes with you. They ask some theoretical questions (for example, design some classes for a chat system) and some whiteboard coding.
As to the coding, there was a lot of recursion and binary trees. There was nothing extremely hard or undoable, no NP-hard problems I was afraid of. I had 4 technical interviews and one talk with the recruiter. The interviewers were great - friendly and pleasant.
I got through without glaring errors or missed questions. But I feared that I was not brilliant enough for them. I was right.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
It was hard to answer behavioral / situation questions. I am very bad at selling myself. It is probably good to practice these:
Describe a simple but great idea that you have successfully implemented.
Describe what you would improve in your current team.
Describe the biggest challenge that you faced in your work.
Describe the situation when your team could not make a deadline and how you handled it.
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.