I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sept 2014
Interview
Referred by a friend of mine who is an employee. A few days following the referral I was contacted by a recruiter who asked for a current version of my resume and gave me an overview of what the team I was interviewing for did. A few days later I had a phone interview in which we discussed my background as well as solving a coding problem live on colabedit.com.
About half a week after the phone I was asked to fly up to Seattle for an on-site interview. This consisted of 4 back to back interviews (including one lunch interview). The lunch interview is all behavioral. Of the other three, 2 were about 33% behavorial, 66% whiteboard coding. The last interview felt more like a knowledge test, being asked a series of basic algorithm and data structure questions pretty rapid fire.
Having told them I had other offers outstanding, the recruited informed me that they would have a decision within the next two days. Received their decision by call the day following the interview
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Be sure you know all the nitty gritty details about how various data structures are implemented
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