I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Jan 2015
Interview
I was contacted by a recruiter on Linkedin. I was given a timed coding exercise to complete on a website. After that I was invited to a recruitment event organized in Europe. The face to face interviews were nice. In the beginning me and other guys sitting in a hotel room were told that there would be 3 interviews for each person but if there was need they could invite some people for the 4th one too(and I was).
During for interviews the format was more or less the same. I had to answer questions about my background, some technical problems and coding on whiteboard.
The thing that bothered me throughout the whole interview process was that there was no clear description of what I was supposed to work on. I didn't have much to say about what I wanted to work on and they decided on my behalf for what role I fitted best(it was something I had absolutely no interest nor previous experience) and which location(not the location I wanted in the first place).
Overall it was a positive experience, talking to smart people in the interviews and solving interesting questions. But for the reasons I explained I ended up declining their offer.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a method that returns true if the two given strings were anagrams.
You are given a stream of characters and a list of valid tokens. Write a method that returns true if the character stream only consists of valid tokes. (Note: number of valid tokens is very big)
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.