The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon (San Jose, CA) in Mar 2012
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter after applying through Amazon's career site. The interviewer was very friendly. Began by explaining the unit in which he worked. He then asked me to describe my background a bit which he used to segue into asking me to describe a project I have worked on, how it was implemented and what I would do to improve the project if I were to re-do that project today. He included some questions about data structures and which would be best suited for the project I had discussed. After that, he asked me to write code to determine if two strings are an anagram. He wanted me to talk through the algorithm before I began coding on collabedit. Overall he was a very nice interviewer, seemed as though he wanted me to do well - was not trying to trick me at any point.
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.
