I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Vancouver, BC)
Interview
Initially contacted by headhunter. Did 2 phone interviews, one basic HR, another one with a very nice programmer, followed by a programming challenge to send in. Then I was asked for an on-site interview in Vancouver. The on-site was really tough, 6 interviews back to back with no break (even lunch is a conversation with your potential manager and one of the IT managers higher-up).
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you design the complete architecture for image storage of Amazon.com storage? Another one was, how would you design a key-value store? I hadn't worked with a lot of big distributed applications so I struggled with these two. I had prepared a lot for the on-site, but the questions were a lot different than the phone interview questions, which mostly focused on small scale algorithms.
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.
Recruiter reaches out after applying through Amazon careers, no referral. Had an initial OA, then after a month had four rounds in two days - three coding one system design. Each round had 30 min behavioral and 30 min coding.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were mainly hashmap, sliding window and interval related.
Interview by recuriter, Phone interview over Chime with one easy Leet code problem and 2 behavioral questions. Although the interviewer was very casual at the start of the conversation, it quickly changed into behavioral questions at the start.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Encoding optimization algorithm and talk about a project you did recently.