I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Amazon (Bengaluru) in Jun 2012
Interview
Recruiter reached me with a schedule in a weekend for f2f interview. I think around 20 candidates were there. Had 4 rounds of technical discussions in a day. Each took 45minutes to 1hour. Mostly targeted with 2 major questions per round. If you totally mess up in one round, don't worry you might get another round as a chance.
Think in broad way. Avoid brute-force approach and give the best solution u think in the beginning itself. If you think about multiple efficient solutions explain all of them briefly. And explain the complexities (time/space).
Practice writing code in a paper. Interviewers will need it for reference and they'll take notes during your interview (they might be typing while you explain). You can ask them to stop it if it disturbs you. Its easy if you practice data structures and algorithms.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
You have a list of sentences/words. How to find out the sub list that consists of a specific prefix?
Ex:
input: prefix="he", list = ["hello", "world", "hello world", "hey dude", "galaxy"....]
output: ["hello", "hello world", "hey dude"]
Imagine a sequence like this: a, b, c...z, aa, ab, ac...zz, aaa, aab, aac.... aax, aaz, aba, abc... (Its same as excel column names).
Given an integer (n), generate n-th string from the above sequence.
Ps: Don't generate the full list of sequence till n. It'll be definitely bad approach :)
Design a system and API that should support 50 instances of custom designed Queue. Basically the question is about how you'll make use the given block of memory, to achieve the above requirement.
How would you design a "recommended products for you" module of amazon.com. Design a zoo.
Find whether the strings in a file are anagrams
Write a program to check whether a binary tree is a binary search 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.