I applied through an employee referral.

The process took 72 days from application to rejection email.

The process consisted of an initial first interview with one of the engineers on the team. This interview included a programming challenge (Leetcode 200: Number of Islands), some questions about my experience and background, and some questions about deadlocks and the hardware architecture of a system I worked on.

After passing this, I was moved onto the final interview loop. This loop included four hour-long interviews with the team and hiring manager. These interviews included:

• Two Leetcode hard questions
• One question on designing a dynamic array
• A system design question
• A bunch of questions on the following Amazon leadership principles:
  • Dive Deep
  • Deliver Results
  • Customer Obsession
  • Ownership
  • Disagree and Commit
  • Bias for Action
  • Insist on High Standards
  • Learn and Be Curious

I thought the interviews overall went pretty well, and I was surprised to receive a generic rejection email three days afterward. I will likely not be applying to Amazon again.

The recruiters were very supportive and responsive. However, the process was too long, and I received no feedback on why I was rejected, so I can't justify going through it again.

LeetCode 200: Number of Islands

LeetCode 126: Word Ladder II

LeetCode 23: Merge k Sorted Lists (This one was slightly altered to be files of log entries (entry objects) with a date property rather than linked lists of nodes with values)

System Design: Design a caching system for delivering virtual machine images to customers.

Design a class for a dynamically resizing array, which is initialized to 100 elements at first. The user should be able to append and pop from the end of the array.

Can you explain the concept of a deadlock?