Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite un selezionatore. La procedura ha richiesto 3 settimane. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Amazon (Seattle, WA) nel mese di ott 2013
Colloquio
Amazon contacted me after receiving my resume through a conference database. They asked me to complete a 90 minute online coding assessment, where I was asked 3 different (relatively simple) coding problems (eg determine whether or not a LinkedList contains a loop). A little over a week later I heard back from HR saying that I had been selected to go to Seattle for an onsite interview.
The interview started at 11:45, and we were first brought into a room where we had lunch and casually talked to employees about Amazon and living in Seattle (there were about 30 of us, all students looking for post-graduation entry-level positions). Then we each were assigned an interviewer and brought to a small room with a whiteboard where I had 45 minutes to first talk about a project I had worked on/experience I'd had in school or internships. Then I was given a coding problem that I had to solve on the whiteboard. After I was finished, I had some time to ask questions of my own. There were four interviews just like this in total, in which I stayed in my room and interviewers came in and out. Two of my interviewers were very nice and helpful if I got stuck, one of them was kind of uncomfortable because I was confused about the problem and was struggling a little bit, and the other one seemed to really dislike me, looking at me like I was an idiot every time I said something or wrote something (he also tried to trip me up by saying that it was necessary to manually resize an ArrayList in Java, which I knew wasn't the case but it got me a little flustered and he told me I need to do some more research after the interview). That particular interviewer was stressful, but the other three didn't seem to want me to fail.
Overall I think that the people there were pretty nice, although maybe a little bit pretentious, but it is Amazon so I suppose they have a right to be, since many many people want to work there and they have the ability to select the best of the best candidates. It was also a little weird after the interview, since my last interviewer walked me to the lobby and left and there was no further discussion or convening. I also wish they had been courteous enough to give me a call telling me I did not get the job rather than sending me an email.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
Give an example of a project where you failed.
Design a program that would select which elevator in a building would be the most efficient, based on where the elevator is located and headed and where the user is located and headed.
Loop — 4 rounds, all on the same day
Round 1 — Coding (DSA)
Interviewer was a senior SDE, very friendly.
Warm-up + behavioral: "Tell me about a time you took ownership of something outside your responsibilities."
Main question: Given a list of meeting intervals, find the minimum number of conference rooms required. I used a heap. He then asked a follow-up: what if meetings could be reassigned to minimize total idle time? We discussed approaches but didn't fully code it.
He cared a lot about how I talked through edge cases out loud.
Round 2 — Coding + Problem Solving
LP question: "Describe a situation where you disagreed with a teammate."
Coding: LRU Cache implementation from scratch. I used a hashmap + doubly linked list. He pushed on thread-safety and what happens at capacity 0.
Round 3 — Behavioral (Bar Raiser)
This was the toughest round — no coding, all Leadership Principles, very deep STAR-format probing.
Questions I got:
"Tell me about a time you failed and what you learned."
"A time you had to deliver something with a tight deadline and limited information."
The bar raiser kept drilling: "What was your specific contribution?" "What would you do differently?" "What data did you use?" Have 6–8 strong stories ready with metrics.
Round 4 — Low-Level Design
Design: Design a parking lot system (classes, vehicle types, spot allocation, pricing). Then he asked me to code the findSpot() and releaseSpot() methods.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
Most coding questions were LeetCode Medium. Common themes: graphs, heaps, sliding window, hashmaps, and LRU/design., system design,
Great interview process with three rounds, including a technical assessment and a technical interview. The interviewers were professional and supportive throughout the process. The questions mainly focused on DSA, problem-solving, and core technical concepts. The discussions were engaging and provided a good opportunity to demonstrate technical skills. Overall, the process was well-structured, smooth, transparent, and a very positive experience.
Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite l'università. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Amazon (Dublino, Dublino)
Colloquio
Online techincal assessment. Had to screen share and complete basic coding tasks similar to Leet Code. Could choose a language of your choice. Overall a very fair system and judged based on merit.
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
Technical assessment so a basic leet code style question about reversing the orders of long numerical strings.