I applied through university. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon in Oct 2012
Interview
They were recruiting from my University. I submitted my resume online on Wednesday. Thursday they emailed me to set up an interview for Tuesday morning. Tuesday night they emailed me to setup 3 more interviews on Thursday. Friday I was notified I had been selected to receive a full time offer.
The recruiter was a little flaky after that, missing phone appointments. Eventually he followed through and set me up with a weekend trip to Seattle to meet some potential teams.
The interviews were mostly technical. Each one was 45 minutes. Each one asked two programming questions and a couple personality type small talk questions. "Why did you choose to study computer science," "what's your favorite/least favorite thing about school." I don't recall any behavior questions, you know the kind, "tell me about a time you failed miserably at something and everyone laughed at you."
Only one of the interviewers tried to make me write compileable code. I tried my best, but reminded how valuable a good IDE is. Know your algorithms and their big-o. Know how to find test cases. Know recursion, dynamic programming, all of the fun stuff.
Going through the interviews I made sure to constantly tell the interviewer what I my thoughts were and why. I gave a reason for everything and when suitable reasons against anything else.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a stream of characters and a set of characters, find the shortest sequence in the stream containing all characters in the set.
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 Jun 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