I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2014
Interview
I received an email invitation to do an online coding screen. I did the screen which was very easy and they immediately invited me onsite; flown out to Seattle where I was put up in a nice hotel. I actually had a moment where I was afraid I made a mistake while sitting in the lobby waiting for my grilling, based on the amazing number of people there for orientation. I really did not like the idea of working for a company that treats their employees like a number, but I obviously forged on. I went in for my interviews and I was in over my head. I didn't really feel the questions were very fair, and I don't think my inability to answer some of them is indicative of my capabilities. I am probably a bit bitter about the whole thing, but I have since found out (from several former employees) that Amazon really overworks and burns out their employees. I unsurprisingly did not get an offer. In hindsight and after speaking with former Amazon employees, I think it was for the best.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design an algorithm for finding possible meeting times between X number of people given each of those people's current schedules.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.