J'ai postulé en ligne. Le processus a pris 4 semaines. J'ai passé un entretien chez Amazon (Seattle, WA) en nov. 2013
Entretien
The first part of the interview was quick. I applied online (via their careers page I think) and received a phone call within a week to schedule a phone interview.
The phone interview was pretty much what I expected, wasn't very difficult. They ask questions about your resume and experience and follow up with technical questions. Mostly CS theory questions like data structures and big-O notation. They also ask you to do some small coding exercises using collabedit.com. They gave me a problem to solve (can't recall what it was now) and after I answered they asked me to implement the algorithm using my language of choice.
A few weeks later I was flown to Seattle for an in-person interview. The position I was interested in is in California, but the in-person interview was still in Seattle... this was weird for me.
Anyway, the in-person interview was exhausting to say the least. It went from 10:30 to 3:30 if I recall. We didn't even really break for lunch. I *had* lunch -- we walked to a nearby restaurant -- but it was with an interviewer who quizzed me the whole time. It was an endless string of interviewers coming in and out. Each one with a slightly different flavour. This part is mostly what I expected, but the exhausting thing was that none of them were allocated enough time for their questions. I was essentially rushed for 5 hours straight. Before leaving, every single interviewer said "I usually take the time now to let you ask some questions, but as you can see the next interviewer is already waiting outside" and then he'd shake my hand and leave. I never did get a chance to ask my own questions.
I left the on-site interview feeling like I was not given a chance to show them how I could be an asset to the company. I few minutes after leaving the building and thinking back on my day, I had several "OH! That's what they wanted to hear.. dammit." moments which to me indicates a weakness in the interview process (or maybe just my interview skills).
The next day I got an email saying that they would not be making an offer.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
Find the largest rectangle area on a bar graph. Example, if you had a graph of 1,4,5,3,3,5 the answer would be 15 (3x5) which is formed by the rectangle that is 3 high and spans from position 2 (1 based) to 6.
The recruitment process consisted of several stages:
Online coding – a one-hour session focused on solving programming problems and demonstrating practical coding skills.
Technical meeting – a two-hour in-depth discussion covering system design, problem-solving approach, and technical knowledge relevant to the role.
Soft skills meeting – a 90-minute conversation assessing communication skills, teamwork, and overall cultural fit.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
describe your current project, most interesting bug and feature.
the most important thing you are proud of.
slide-window algorithm, string parser
The technical round focused on a DSA problem about finding the closest points to the origin, where I was asked to explore multiple approaches like sorting, heaps, and quickselect. It felt straightforward, and I was ready for it thanks to the time I spent on PracHub brushing up on similar questions. The interview also included a behavioral section, but overall, I found the process to be very easy. Happy to say I received an offer, which I gladly accepted!
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
K Closest Points to Origin - given an array of points on the 2D plane and an integer k, return the k closest points to the origin (0,0). Walk through sort-by-distance O(n log n), heap-based O(n log k), and quickselect O(n) average; discuss when to prefer each based on the relationship between n and k.
Tough interview.
The Process: Automated Online Assessment (OA) with 2 coding questions and a system simulation, followed by a 4-round virtual Loop. Every single round started with 20 minutes of intense, behavioral behavioral questions diving into Amazon's Leadership Principles, followed by 25 minutes of technical coding or system design.
Amazon interviews are a test of mental endurance because you have to switch from deep behavioral storytelling straight into complex coding which can be so difficult. I used Apex Interviewer to practice the cognitive context switch. Running through their live-coding workspace helped me ensure my technical communication and architectural structures remained sharp and automatic, even after spending the first half of the interview defending my past project metrics. I fed the practice AI questions I extracted from glassdoor and gothamloop.
In the end, the offer was way lower than I hoped.
Questions d'entretien [1]
Question 1
Design the backend inventory tracking and placement service for a global fulfillment network, ensuring strict transactional consistency across multiple regional warehouses during peak shopping events.