I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Oct 2024
Interview
It was a one hour tech screen. The first 15 minutes were a discussion of my past experience. Questions asked included, "Tell me about some of the models you've worked with? What was the impact? What were the features? What were you experimenting with." Another question was, "tell me about a time you were 50% of the way into a project and decided to pivot."
Then we spent ~40 minutes on a coding question. The coding question was to implement a rate limiter capable of enforcing a maximum number of requests per second for each source (e.g. IP address).
The last 5 minutes were for me to ask questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement a rate limiter capable of enforcing a maximum number of requests per second for each source (e.g. IP address).
Assume that your rate limiter receives events of the form (source, timestamp) where each event represents a request
and must make a decision to either allow or throttle the request.
The technical round focused on a DSA problem about finding the closest points to the origin, where I was asked to explore multiple approaches like sorting, heaps, and quickselect. It felt straightforward, and I was ready for it thanks to the time I spent on PracHub brushing up on similar questions. The interview also included a behavioral section, but overall, I found the process to be very easy. Happy to say I received an offer, which I gladly accepted!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
K Closest Points to Origin - given an array of points on the 2D plane and an integer k, return the k closest points to the origin (0,0). Walk through sort-by-distance O(n log n), heap-based O(n log k), and quickselect O(n) average; discuss when to prefer each based on the relationship between n and k.
Tough interview.
The Process: Automated Online Assessment (OA) with 2 coding questions and a system simulation, followed by a 4-round virtual Loop. Every single round started with 20 minutes of intense, behavioral behavioral questions diving into Amazon's Leadership Principles, followed by 25 minutes of technical coding or system design.
Amazon interviews are a test of mental endurance because you have to switch from deep behavioral storytelling straight into complex coding which can be so difficult. I used Apex Interviewer to practice the cognitive context switch. Running through their live-coding workspace helped me ensure my technical communication and architectural structures remained sharp and automatic, even after spending the first half of the interview defending my past project metrics. I fed the practice AI questions I extracted from glassdoor and gothamloop.
In the end, the offer was way lower than I hoped.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design the backend inventory tracking and placement service for a global fulfillment network, ensuring strict transactional consistency across multiple regional warehouses during peak shopping events.
Initial screening call with recruiter followed by a 1 hr hacker rank question on DSA. The final round was a panel consisting of 4 interviews ranging from technical design, more DSA and behaviour questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Describe a time when you disagreed with your team and how you resolved it
