I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Oct 2019
Interview
I live in Seattle so only a matter of time before a recruiter reached out to me. After an HR intro call, I did a 90 minute coding evaluation. Then I had a 1 hour phone screen with the hiring manager. After that was the on-site consisting of one hour interviews: 1 system design question, 3 coding questions, and a behavioral interview. Each system & coding interview had about 15-20 minutes of behavioral questions (you can find these questions online). They did give me the option of coding on a laptop instead of a whiteboard but when I actually got to the onsite they didn't let me use the laptop.
One of the interviewers was the best one I've ever had, not only did I feel like we collaborated on the coding question I actually walked away learning something new. On the flip side, another interviewer was one of the worst interviewers I've ever had - she wasn't paying attention and I had to repeat questions to her and her phone kept going off the entire interview and she never bothered to silence it. The recruiters were a mixed bag as well, with my initial recruiter being completely professional while my main recruiter barely acknowledged I existed and always seemed like he had better things to do.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard stuff, no surprises: System design, LRU cache, Trapping rain water, Binary tree question, behavioral questions (if you google the leadership characteristics you can find lists of exactly the questions they're asking - only 2 of the roughly 20 behavioral questions I was asked weren't on the lists I found)
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
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Santa Clara, CA) in Jun 2026
Interview
Recruiter reached out and set up an onsite loop after the initial steps. Four back to back rounds in one day. Two coding heavy rounds run by senior engineers, one round with the hiring manager, and one behavioral round with a bar raiser. Mix of leadership principles and data structures throughout. Heard back within a week.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard BFS grid problem. Given a grid, find the time for all cells to reach a target state where the spread happens one layer at a time.
How did you answer: Clarified the constraints, walked through the approach, then coded a clean BFS from all starting points at once. Tracked the number of layers until everything was covered.