I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (Cambridge, MA) in Jan 2012
Interview
They were building a new site in Cambridge so they had the interview in Boston at a hotel. I waited in the lobby for the interviewers, who arrived in an elevator and then took you to be interviewed. Others also waited in the lobby to be interviewed. I was told there would be either 2 or 4 1:1 interviews, each about an hour.
The interview itself was primarily what my experience was, followed by questions about things I had done, followed by coding problems. Then I was asked if I had any questions for them.
I was already happily employed and would not have looked forward to driving to Cambridge. That day it took me 1.5 hours to arrive. Also I had read about carrying a pager here on glassdoor.com, and asked the interviewers about that. One said you carry it for a week every month; the next said you carry it for a week every 2 months.
I was told at the end of my 2nd interview that there would be just 2 interviews that day. I responded, "That must be a bad sign" with the response that it probably wasn't a good sign. Sure enough I did not get the job.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Given the word "HEAD" and the word "TAIL," write code and/or describe using computer science algorithms how you would transform from the word HEAD to the word TAIL. Each change must be by only one letter, you cannot change the letter in a given position twice, and each new word must be a valid word.
Given a binary tree with the usual left and right pointers on each node, and additionally a parent pointer, make an algorithm to discover the closest ancestor to 2 nodes on the tree.
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.
