I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in May 2009
Interview
The recruiter asked some initial questions of why Amazon, and explained the process (2 Phone Screens, then one day of in-house interviews). Setting up the interviews / phone screens took some time to accommodate my schedule, but things went very professionally.
1st & 2nd PS: Questions
- Why Amazon?
- What is your favorite project in the past and what did you do personally?
- What is multiple inheritance? How is it possible in C++ vs. Java?
- What are design patterns good for? Explain MVC and its components.
- Reverse the order of words in a string.
- Find the number of 1's in the binary representation of an integer.
- Complexity (time and space) for the previous solutions?
- Design code completion feature in an IDE: what Abstract Data Type would you use?
- Implement a queue, using only a finite number of stacks.
- Do you have any questions for us?
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of 1's in binary representation of integer?
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.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Calgary, AB) in June 2026
Interview
Online Assessment is the first step in the process. I didn’t have an HR phone screening and went straight to the OA after applying. It was sent to me about a week after I submitted my application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first question is LeetCode style algorithms question, and the second question gives a full stack repo (choice of Java, NodeJS, or Django) and asks to solve a backend issue which is causing a bug in the frontend. Unit tests must pass to pass the second question. You can run both backend/frontend indivdually or together