I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon in Feb 2014
Interview
A recruiter contacted me after seeing my profile on linkedin. After a screening phone interview with the recruiter they set-up a 75-minute technical phone interview with one of their SDEs. They set-up a collabnet session where you had to write code on-the-fly.
After a brief discussion about my work history, he asked 3 questions:
1. tell me what you know about binary search trees.
2. write method which takes a tree node and returns true/false if it is a bst.
3. write a method which takes an array of ints and an int value, and return all pairs of values from the array that add up to the value.
All 3 should have been easy questions, but I badly flubbed #2 and #3 :-) Dumb, because I had seen both of those questions posted here and on other sites.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Nothing unexpected. If you read this site you will see that others have had the exact questions I got.
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