Recruiter screen, online assessment, technical interviews, and behavioral rounds focused heavily on Amazon Leadership Principles. The process was structured, with a strong emphasis on problem-solving, coding skills, and examples demonstrating impact and ownership.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 days. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jan 2017
Interview
Code test online followed in-person 4-hour session. Recruiter gave me only a week timeframe before flying up to interview, and was sat in a room with lots of whiteboards. Interviewers gave no indication of the culture of the company, looked tired and unhappy, and had really no idea what I would be working on. Lots of white board coding sessions with no feedback. No interview feedback after the interview. Happy to not receive an offer.
Recruiter screen, followed by an online coding assessment and then a technical phone interview. The final round was a virtual onsite loop with multiple interviews covering data structures, system design, debugging, and Amazon Leadership Principles. The technical questions were practical but time-constrained, and the behavioural questions required specific examples using the STAR format.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a scalable URL shortening service and explain how you would handle high read traffic, collisions, database schema, expiration, and basic monitoring.
That moment when the interviewer asked about finding indices in an array for a target sum was wild — I had just tackled something identical while prepping on PracHub. The interview included a technical round with another question about designing an in-memory LRU cache and a behavioral question about meeting tight deadlines. After a smooth discussion, I was told I'd received an offer, which I happily accepted. Overall, the process felt pretty straightforward and not overly challenging.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an array of integers return the indices of two numbers summing to a target