My resume was submitted via a friend to an internal recruiter with Amazon.com. The resume was then picked up by a department seeking an SDE. The department's recruiter contacted me via email to set up a phone interview, which was scheduled in short order. At the appointed time, I received a call from the interviewer who turned out to be a SDE in the department (as opposed to the hiring manager). She provided me an overview of the responsibilities of her team and then asked me to say a little about myself, which I did. Then the interview got technical. She asked me a data structures/selection algorithm question followed by an object question. After I was done with those, I had an opportunity to ask questions, which I did. The entire interview took an hour. While I get that amazon.com deals with large quantities of data and efficient evaluation of that data is necessary, I think they may be eliminating very good candidates with excellent capacity to learn (like myself, of course) by asking for answers to questions that the CODE IS ALREADY WRITTEN FOR. This is a commentary, of course on the data structure/algorithm question. Object design is a more obvious way to see how I think and approach problem solving.

Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.