I applied through other source. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Montréal, QC) in Feb 2012
Interview
So, I met an Amazon recruiter at a software engineering conference for undergraduate students. After a brief chat, she sent me to speak with one of the two engineers at the Amazon booth. This engineer asked me a data structures related programming question. Naturally, this question had a simple naive solution as well as an optimized solution. I coded up a quick solution both ways and explained them.
Approximately 3 weeks later, I was contacted and Amazon flew me out to Seattle for an interview at their headquarters (no phone interview). At their headquarters, there was a 6 hour long coding intensive interview conducted in small groups, with a 1 on 1 interview to close out the day.
Two days after, I was extended an offer, which I accepted. All in all, a very pleasant experience.
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
