I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Edinburgh, Scotland) in Dec 2013
Interview
I submitted my resume online, and was contacted two weeks later for an online challenge on codility. There were three questions, which were not difficult. However, it started with the most difficult questions, and I spent over thirty minutes on that and I started to panic cause I only had 90 minutes in total. I solved the first question perfectly, but with the second one, though being easier, I missed some edge cases. The third question was too simple (think of fizz-buzz), but due to my rush, I was so exhausted and I decided to submit the answer anyway (didn't realize my mistake in the second question until late).
Anyway, I thought I failed and wasn't expecting to hear from them anytime soon, but it turned out I did well enough and they moved me to the phone screening round. The first round was very simple - the engineer asked only basic questions and did some small coding. I was told then that they would do another round of phone interview - the questions weren't too difficult, and I stumbled a bit but I think I did very well.
Finally, they moved me forward to the onsite interview. As I'm based in Asia and the team in Edinburgh, they sent me to the Tokyo office and I did the interview with the virtual conferencing room there. The interview questions were standard - I also stumbled a bit but basically I managed fine. I was told of that they decided to extend an offer a week later
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One question involve removing a node in a linked list with recursion - I was given a buggy piece of code and was asked to fix it. I was distracted when I mentioned this would not work on a long linked list so I couldn't answer it but the engineer let it go anyway since we were short on time
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.