I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2012
Interview
Applied online, emailed me back after a couple of months. I took an online assessment, then they flew me out for an on-site interview. The interview lasted about 3 hours and consisted of 4-5 people.
Questions:
-Given two arrays of integers, find matches.
-Find path in tree that sums up to desired value, first complete path, then partial path.
-Head to tail problem - given a word (such as head) and a target word (such as tail) find if a path of words exists from source word to target word where each step is a new word created by changing one letter in the previous step. (head->heal->teal->tell->tall->tail)
-Given a square array of letters, find all english words in the left-to-right, top-to-bottom, and north-east directions.
-Convert integer to roman numeral
I choked on more than one.. mostly due to pressure I think. Walking back to the hotel, I thought of many better answers.
As far as the company goes, lots of young people, lots of dogs, really cool building, and relaxed atmosphere. Seattle is a great city, and it seemed like a nice place to work.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The head to tail problem was rather difficult for me... first I created a function to generate all words created by changing one letter of a word, then I mentioned doing iterative deepening DFS. Probably should have gone with A* search, with number of different letters as the heuristic... maybe keep a list of explored words to avoid duplicates.
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.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
Um teste de código online, se aprovado, vai para o loop. O loop é 4 entrevistas seguidas, duas em inglês e duas em português. 3 entrevistas técnicas de código, todas as 4 têm pergunta de liderança.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Pergunta historicas baseada nos principios de lideranca da amazon.
