I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2016
Interview
One phone technical interview followed by onsite interviews. The phone interview which was completely technical was the most fun experience. The interviewer sounded reasonable and experienced in interviewing.
The onsite interviewers overall were friendly but most of the interviews felt redundant with the same subjective questions being asked repeatedly. The team appeared relatively new and lack interviewing skills in general. They seemed surprised hearing past extraordinary project achievements to the extent that they looked and sounded not-trusting them. Most of the explanation and details of the past achievements did not appear to delve well with them also because of the unfamiliarity with technologies used.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Onsite Interviews are not as much about your technical skills as it is about your past accomplishments and leadership skills as per their principals.
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.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
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.