I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA)
Interview
Started with the standard 2 online rounds. Didn't ace the technical questions on the second round but made it to the onsites anyway.
At no point in the process did I actually get to speak with the recruiter. All communication was seemingly through computer-generated emails and your responses seem to go into some digital black hole. My onsite interview was delayed twice after the spot I asked for "filled up" despite answering the email within 5 minutes. When my interview finally scheduled I had to send many urgent emails because I was not contacted in order to schedule flights until 2 days before my interview.
I had the "group" interview in Seattle. The group portion only lasts a few minutes, the rest of the time you're coding on your own. An engineer speaks to you for about 15 minutes at the end. I could hardly understand the engineer I was paired with, he had a very think accent and was very quite so that made communication difficult. Finally, getting my results took OVER A MONTH which is, frankly, unacceptable. I've interviewed at many companies large and small and no one has ever taken anything close to that amount of time.
My interview experience gave the impression that Amazon doesn't really care about you as an individual, you're just a part in their machine. The entire process was shockingly impersonal.
Interviewed for silicon team. Have only been asked about the domain specific knowledge in 1st round and system design in 2nd round and C coding in 3rd round.
The interviews were 50 mins each.
First round with hr screening - 2 leetcode questions then hr manager screening then the loop which consists of 4 interviews each an hour long. The 4 interview questions they asked where three medium leetcode questions. And one system design interview question about how to shadow deploy a test software to millions of users.
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.