I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (San Francisco, CA) in Oct 2020
Interview
I applied online. Got reached out to by a recruiter, had an initial call and then an online assessment. Standard Leetcode questions, nothing too difficult.
Got to a virtual onsite and this is where things unfortunately did not go very well. One interview with system design and three standard Leetcode question interviews. Nailed the first three interviews, but absolutely failed the last one. Not because I didn't understand the question, but the interviewer's accent was so thick I literally could not even understand the specifications of the problem, especially over Chime (Amazon's version of Zoom). On top of that his 5 year old son was literally screaming in the background and actually came onto the screen multiple times until I had to ask for his son to leave because now I could not only understand him, but I couldn't hear him either. Needless to say, I did not leave a good impression on the interviewer and I was not in the least surprised that they decided not to extend an offer.
Probably an unfortunate reality of interviewing during the pandemic, he might have been easier to understand in person and without the kid running around.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Standard Leetcode technical questions. Nothing unexpected or
Definitely prepare for Amazon Principles questions, though, since each interviewer will ask you a few and will drill down so it is difficult to make stuff up on the spot.
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.