I applied through other source. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Oct 2014
Interview
First contact was at a job fair. Answered some basic object oriented programming questions.
A few days later I was contacted by e-mail to schedule first phone interview.
First phone interview were general questions about my résumé, as well as a brief explanation of the Software Development Position I was interviewing for and some additional technical questions about data structures.
Contacted again to schedule a second phone interview.
The second phone interview was of a more technical nature.
First question was about the implementation of a phone book and how to handle misspellings, i.e. how to also return slight variations of a query.
Second question was to describe how I would implement a function that determines whether 2 elements of an integer array will sum up to a certain target value.
I proposed a naïve solution first (in O(N²)), but was asked to also give a possible solution that is in O(N).
Both interviewers told me that the phone interviews are scheduled in such a way that there remains time at the end for the interviewee to ask question. However, as the whole process seemed pretty clear to me, I didn't have any specific questions. This might have been the reason why Amazon chose to not take my application to the next step.
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