I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
I began with a phone screen, then received an invitation for an on-site interview. There were - technically - 6 interviews; one with HR, 4 technical, and one with the manager I would be working for over lunch. The process took about 4 hours in total (45 minutes per interview, with HR being short).
The phone screen was fairly simple and short (about half an hour), and the on-site had much more interesting questions; only one was what I would consider a 'staple' coding question that it would be likely to have come across in another interview (I actually had used it a couple times when I was interviewing others in the past). The emphasis in the interviews seemed primarily about optimization and refinement - while the questions were not (for the most part) that difficult, the interviewers strongly pushed at improving solutions, catching edge cases, and fixing bugs, rather than implementing difficult or esoteric algorithms.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One of the interviewers (not the 'bar-raiser') asked a very open ended question about how to design a specific system in a way that could effectively and efficiently scale to meet Amazon's needs.
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Bengaluru) in Jun 2012
Interview
2 phone interviews followed by an onsite interview which again concists of 4 rounds Most questions are from DS an Algorithms and scalability
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Find the longest
subarray which consists of numbers that can be arranged in a continuous sequence.
For ex- {4,5,1,5,7,6,8,4,1}
output-{5,7,6,8,4}.Find the longest.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Amazon (Bengaluru) in Jun 2012
Interview
Recruiter reached me with a schedule in a weekend for f2f interview. I think around 20 candidates were there. Had 4 rounds of technical discussions in a day. Each took 45minutes to 1hour. Mostly targeted with 2 major questions per round. If you totally mess up in one round, don't worry you might get another round as a chance.
Think in broad way. Avoid brute-force approach and give the best solution u think in the beginning itself. If you think about multiple efficient solutions explain all of them briefly. And explain the complexities (time/space).
Practice writing code in a paper. Interviewers will need it for reference and they'll take notes during your interview (they might be typing while you explain). You can ask them to stop it if it disturbs you. Its easy if you practice data structures and algorithms.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
You have a list of sentences/words. How to find out the sub list that consists of a specific prefix?
Ex:
input: prefix="he", list = ["hello", "world", "hello world", "hey dude", "galaxy"....]
output: ["hello", "hello world", "hey dude"]
Imagine a sequence like this: a, b, c...z, aa, ab, ac...zz, aaa, aab, aac.... aax, aaz, aba, abc... (Its same as excel column names).
Given an integer (n), generate n-th string from the above sequence.
Ps: Don't generate the full list of sequence till n. It'll be definitely bad approach :)
Design a system and API that should support 50 instances of custom designed Queue. Basically the question is about how you'll make use the given block of memory, to achieve the above requirement.
How would you design a "recommended products for you" module of amazon.com. Design a zoo.
Find whether the strings in a file are anagrams
Write a program to check whether a binary tree is a binary search tree