I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2014
Interview
I talked with a recruiter, then a technical phone screen with coding problems, followed by an on site interview with 6 sessions, 5 technical and one with HR. Technical questions covered things like graph problems, sorting streams of integers, checking if a given list of words are contained in a magazine. Every problem was coupled with an analysis of computational complexity and memory trade offs.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you optimize the recipient of IPC message packets so that all messages are stored in a database with high throughout despite a (relatively) slow database connection.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
The phone screen went longer than expected, focusing heavily on implementation details. The interviewer really grilled me on my approach to a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache, asking how I'd combine a hashmap with a doubly linked list. I felt well-prepared since I had gone through system design examples on PracHub, which made me comfortable discussing eviction policies. The later rounds included more technical questions and behavioral interviews, but in the end, I received an offer, though I ultimately decided to decline. Overall, I’d say the process was average, with solid questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design and implement a Least Recently Used (LRU) cache supporting get(key) and put(key, value) in O(1) average time. Walk through combining a hashmap with a doubly linked list, eviction policy when capacity is exceeded, and how you'd extend it to handle thread-safe concurrent access.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.