J'ai postulé via un recruteur. Le processus a pris 1 jour. J'ai passé un entretien chez Amazon (Seattle, WA) en janv. 2011
Entretien
I was applying online on dice/monster and one of the recruiters might have seen my resume so they fixed up an appointment.
I would have to say that I was a little rusty since the last interview I gave was over 4-5 yrs back so I screwed it up. Anyways there were two interviewers in the first interview.
The first one was more friendly, he asked me about Design Patterns, Garbage Collection algorithms, Priority Queue data structure (which DS would you use if you had to implement pop and push methods). Wherever I would get stuck, I would tell him what I am thinking and he would help correct me and I was able to nail it. I had good long chat with him, talked to him about which project are they recruiting for.
The second interviewer didn't seem to like my experience as a lead, he thought it was more of project mgmt. I think it is with him that I might have earned a negative review, but not without screwing up some easy questions. He asked me to write a program to printout words in a string in reverse fashion (so "Hello World" becomes "World", "Hello"). He asked me to write a program and read it out aloud. I fumbled on it. He asked me some database questions like difference b/w primary, unique and null key. Explain a deadlock scenario in Oracle.
Although the real negative part was the Amazon recruiter who was so eager to fix up an interview but didn't have courtesy to mail back and say that i didn't make the cut. I did email her since I had time crunch issues and wanted the interview to move fast if I did make the cut. However guessing it by her non response, I moved on. So typical of companies these days.
I would mark this as positive experience because the interviewers were nice and it did tell me of my shortcomings.
One tip to those due to interview: Go through the list of questions people post here (atleast in the first 10 pages). It the same questions with a little variation.
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.