I applied online. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2014
Interview
Applied online and then quite a while later (1-2 months) I got an email inviting me to come to Seattle for an on-site interview. There was no phone interview or anything like that. The day of the interview, all the candidates were split into groups of 3 and we were given a problem to complete, which was very clearly separated into 3 parts. All of the parts involved some sort of minimization problem and one of them, the one I chose, involved making predictions based on historical data and then minimizing costs based on the prediction. I got the impression that they kind of wanted us to work together but the problems weren't too related to each other and they said that we were not supposed to do any pair programming so that didn't really happen. We just worked on our problems and then periodically had short meetings with Amazon engineers to talk about our progress (I think there were 3 of these throughout the day). At the end, we submitted our code and then had a short info session with some more engineers and that was it.
Overall, it was a pretty good way to do interviews, I think. Definitely gave them a lot more info about my skills than most interviews do.
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Other Software Development Engineer I Interview Reviews for Amazon
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.