I applied through college or university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2013
Interview
I applied when they were going to come on campus, but fell sick so could not attend the interview. Later they arranged a phone interview. I had two technical phone interviews - questions were based on data structures and algorithms. Then I went onsite for 4 technical interviews in one day.
1) difference between arraylist and linked list
2) difference between Binary tree and BST
3) complexities
4) Using BST in hashmap for insertion at the time of collision
5) From BST find a number closest to a particular number
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
1) Implement scrabble game - given a scrabbled word the program should return the correct english word. This was supposed to be done using the trie data structure.
2) Roman numbers implementation. Given a number program should return its equivalent roman number. 10 rules for roman number generation were given and I had to incorporate all of them
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
having 3 telephone interview, questions like tree level by level print, next bigger number of tree, merge link list, design distributed system, OOD design elevator and address book, then face to face onsite interview with 7 different person including one hr, questions are given from a easy beginning, then follow up with reduce time complexity and memory limitation.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2013
Interview
I was approached by a recruiter who then sent my resume over to the Hiring dept. They were prompt and scheduled the interview within a week.
There were 4 technical rounds and 1 with HR. All the interviewees were personable and friendly. A lot of the questions involved coding. They walked me through many of the problems and asked questions as I was coding. They wanted to understand my thought process. If I strayed or did something wrong, they'd ask questions to indicate it. Fairly standard questions on algorithms. Definitely prepare for graph, tree algorithms, data structures and be prepared to justify a choice for a data structure. The interviewers didn't particularly care about syntax, but they want to see that you are comfortable putting pen to paper.
Also be prepared with atleast 5-6 questions you want to ask them. I ran out of these and it became awkward towards the end!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a large web-based, highly scalable, highly available system. This was an open-ended question. You should make sure to ask the interviewer lots of questions to narrow down the problem before jumping into a solution.