I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2012
Interview
I applied through the career fair of our university. They contacted me afterwards and invited for a hiring event at Seattle. There were several candidates who were interviewed on the same day. I had 4 rounds of interviews and the difficulty of questions varied for moderate to hard. With good preparation of computer science basics and some interview practice, it is relatively easy to crack this interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I was asked to implement a hash map from scratch. It was challenging because we don't really think in detail about how to do it. There were problems about resolving hash collisions, how to maintain the hash map, how to update/ delete elements, complexity analysis etc. Overall I think this was a very good question to test both CS fundamentals and coding skills.
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.