Since it seems like this is the most popular page on my blog I figure I would

update it. The number of questions on glassdoor exploded. 3000+questions. I

guess Amazon keeps hiring and firing?

Questions
Tell me about yourself. Dont say something typical
They
grill very deeply on your experience. Give you lots of If we did this
to our business, what is the impact? type of questions
Interview only lasted five minuted. There were few questions.
dfdf sf
Phone
interview was pretty easy , I was asked about forms,get vs post and
some js events. The onsite focused on responsive design , oo
inheritance, closures, css /html ,json
Why didnt you want to major in mathematics
Phone interview: research + one coding questionOnsite:
Two rounds of research interviews and two rounds of coding. Asked
typical coding questions, similar to LeetCode. No brain teaser.
The dependency sequence.
I
dont feel that there was any one question that caused me too much
trouble and I never got the sense that there was one specific person
who
was trying to pin me down and raise the bar. However, all of the
interviewers were very pointed in their questioning and had obviously
done their homework on my skills and background which I appreciated.

During sfsdf pdf

the interview I was asked to tell some details about the project on my
resume, and several small questions like how to design a small APP, to
impress a person in elevator.
How do you improve a stapler??
The coding tests were somewhat challenging. They required careful
review of all test cases.
Did you have been in the situation which you missed a deadline?
No question. Just follow the steps and youre hired.
Tell me what your most complicated excel model looked like. Walk me
through it.
Asked about challenges at work, how do you resolve conflict with
coworkers, and what did you learn from the experience.
All questions were generic.
How would you convince Jeff Bezos to approve a hypothetical project.
The questions were pretty simple but I took time to answer.
The questions were quite expected. I encourage interviewees to keep
their calm and everything will go fine.
Tell me about a time when you didnt make the right decision and what
did you do to resolve it?
They ask you to do some role playing with a difficult employee. It
seemed they did it more for their amusement then anything.
Nothing
really unexpected, standard questions around your coding solution,
whats the runtime, how would you improve the solution.
where would you locate new warehouse location?
what mistake did you make and how did you resolve it?
Why do you want to work for us.
Tell
me about a time that I was confronted with an ethical situation /
decision. What was it, how did i resolve it, and what was the outcome.

Would you steal?

Less
of a specific question and more that each interview was highly focused
in a particular skill areathe quicker that was obvious, the quicker it
was to tailor responses accordingly.
The
story problem was 15 minutes long, and moderately challenging. If
youre good at math and operationally experienced, it shouldnt be
hard.
the testing problem
Zig Zag tree traversal, create something similar to your t9 dictionary.
Given
a 33 keypad with ABC on number 2, DEF on number 3 and so on.
Given a
set of numbers, output all the english words that can be obtained from
it. Assume an in-built function exists to check if the given word is an
english word or not.Eg: inuput: 228, output: bat, cat, act and so on.
They give you a different job title and ask you a question about that
department.
Ethical behavior questions. Be very strict with your response.
The project given itself very difficult. It involves lots of algos and
machine learning.
Designing a directory
Tell
me about a time when questions with LOTS of follow-up questions.
Why did you do it that way? What would you have done differently?
Why
didnt you do it better the first time?
Tell me about a time youve strongly disagreed with your leadership?
What did you do and how did you handle that.
Connect 4 implementation.
Fairly standard questions.
It wasnt particularly difficult.
Describe a time you have disagreed with your manager
The most difficult question was mine:I
can understand not being selected, but I cant understand that they
wouldnt let me know early enough for me to avoid wasting so much
time.
Why would you schedule me for an interview, then lose interest in me
and
not even let me know but rather just not show up? If I did the same, I
would probably be blacklisted by your company!
Have
many examples ready of sales that went poorly, sales you loved, times
you disagreed with a manager, if you could start any company, what
would
it be.
No questions asked since there isnt a interview process.
What would you suggest to make your work more fun?
How would you add n items in Fibonacci Series?
The problem was straightforward and one should be very familiar with
collections and data structures in the STL.
Nothing too difficult or unexpected.
Median of two sorted array
How
do you design the system to allow users to rent movies on-demand,
provided that all movies are already stored on a company ftp server.
Should prepare some ood questions.
Design
the software backend for a system that checks if vehicles are speeding
on roads. Constraints: 1 camera per direction of road.
Are you sure you can do this?
It was unexpected to answer deep dive questions on everything and I
expected more technical questions.
Case
Based: Describe why the average revenue of the individual product is
going down while the average revenue of the entire product line is
going
up.
Asked to write code online. Posed scenarios where teams are difficult
to deal with and how to manage around it.
website customer behavior question.
Base on the code that youve written so far, what can you add or
modify to improve it?
Many
of the behavioral questions were similar (i.e. along the lines of tell
you how you improved a process). The math question is straight
forward
as others have posted.
Why do you use THIS_DATA_STRUCTURE?
The problem was related to machine learning knowledge.
No unexpected questions
Give me a time you had to act quickly without any data.
the
programming questions are not very difficult. one is compute the
maximum amplitude of a binary tree, the other is to choose the values
of
parameters to get the maximum value.
How do you define done?
They
are all different but I can suggest you: 1) Dont make up things; 2)
prepare compelling stories on how you effectively managed people
and
solved technical / business problems; 3) remember that the
interviewed
are professionals like you and one day you might work together as
vendor, client or business partners.
First phone screening had 2 unexpected questions that were slightly
intense:1. Give an example of a time when you resolved a problem
quickly and how did you do it.2. Give an example of a problem you
resolved in a 2 step process and how it impacted the business.
One of the UX designer asked me to do a design challenge.
How would Amazon sell hovercrafts on its site?
How would you manage 2000 plus vendors?
Questions were all theoretical
The
questions were mostly behavioral requiring you to describe what you
did
on certain situations. Of course there were questions which required
you to explain why you applied to this role and what makes you special
in this role.
They
asked about the most difficult problem I had to solve in my past jobs,
this was a difficult questions because I did not work on projects that
are as complex as Amazons systems and finding an impressive
problem was
very hard for me. Must be prepared about these questions beforehand.

Didnt expect there will be reasoning and working style assessment. s

(2)
Describing a time where you needed to make a decision based on
prioritizing.
how and when do we know we achieved least possible shipping costs?

Not hard.
Find an alternative way to optimize the algorithm.
None were rather difficult or unexpected.
system design and some detailed concepts
What do you consider exceptional customer service?
You
sign a non-disclosure agreement prior to the on-site interview so I
will respect that and not give away any actual questions. Just make
sure
you understand Amazons leadership values, know that you will be
answering behavioral questions, and be prepared.
When is it ever acceptable to violate a rule or regulation?
I had 2 back to back technical interviewsQuestion1: Find two numbers
in an unsorted array that equal to a given sumQuestion2: Find the first
unique character in a string
Find if a word is anagram (e.g. ana is an anagram).
Math question which was a flow question, not that difficult once you
work through it but dont rush
No difficult questions just asked a about my past experience and if I
understood what the job entailed
No questions were asked.
All questions I was asked about was about the project.
Tell me about a time when you told your manager you are full of crap

Design the recommendations list for amazon webpage.

write
a function that takes in an int and returns a string that would be how
one would say that number (ex: 123 -> one hundred twenty three;
50019
-> five thousand nineteen).
How
would you go about assessing potential market size or demand for a
product type that has never been launched before? e.g., kindle e-
reader
(before that kind of tech came to market)
Writing a Poker game during the on-site interview which is quite
efficient in terms of memory and speed
The
tech test was not particularly technical but it is definitely a good
idea to be able to explain on a basic level how computers and the
internet work. An example of a question would have been to explain
the
difference between wifi and 3G.
Before
my interview I had to write a memo and during one of my interviews I
had to explain the technical concepts in the memo. It wasnt that it
was
difficult, it was just that it was unexpected.
Usual Algo and data structure questions followed by Design an ATV
[Tested OOPS principles]
N th element in a binary tree.Mirror Image of a Binary treeQueue using
stacks.Garage class model.
I reviewed all the other questions mentioned. Only new question was
regarding operating fork lifts.
Nothing really unexpected. Simple OOP concept. Its not like design a
class for elevator stuff that complex.
Ask me to implement a BFS for a social network
I did not expect multiple pricing questions in my first interview.
All technique questions. Difficult if you donesnt prepare well.
Main
question was verifying whether a binary tree was a BST, given the
function header that looked like public boolean isBST(root). He stated
no other functions could be created and that child nodes did not have
links to their parents. s (2)
determine if two strings have the same suffix. The strings will be given
in a list formateg : C -> A -> P -> A -> B -> L -> E
Nothing too difficult although one should be strong with using data
structures.
The most difficult question was describe a time you had an unhappy
customer that wanted you to do something you could not do.
Implement a stack data structure with O(1) push, pop and access to
the largest element.
Although
I was interviewing for a web developer position, many of the
interviewers covered a large range of technical questions, from
server-side technologies, to operational issues, to data structures, to
algorithms, in addition to the expected JS/HTML/CSS questions.
Im
going to give you 5 million dollars and I want you to spend it on
purchasing keywords on Google, bringing Amazon to one of the
favored
positions, either at the top or to the right, for those keywords, and
returning 50 million in increased revenue.
All ccid level questions. Nothing unexpected.
To discourse about Trees.
Price product X.
An optimal algorithm to check whether a hand of cards was a full
house (in Poker) or not.
One interviewer asked an OOD question (design a movie-actor search
system). I can not understand all what he said.
No weird questions. Mostly behavioral questions and past
accomplishments.
How will i calculate the angle between the hour hand and minute hand
if I am provided with time in HH:MM format
They
wanted to know about my ideas about digital currency and how I,
without
any recon or knowledge of Amazon infrastructure, would hack them.
How do you create a routing table?
All questions were behavioral based, Tell me a time when situations.

None
that stand out. For Level 4 TAM positions they appear to focus on
multi-tasking skills and the ability to learn from mistakes while also
thinking big and taking ownership over projects that arent necessarily
under your purview. Expressing how you implemented workflow
changes that
made a substantial improvement in the customer experience would be
something to focus on, as well as mentioning the Amazon core
principles:
think big, invent and simplify, customer obsession, etc.
1. Implement a hashset from scratch, write code for various methods
of hashset.2. Find all the pairs of numbers from a list that sums to a
particular number.
Tell the detailed content of HTTP header.
Bar raiser
Asked
to break up a string with no spaces into valid words ie.
itwasthebestoftimes should be processed to read as it was the best
of
times.
there wasnt any difficult questions being asked
A inherits from B, which inherits from C. Will initializing A invoke
constructor of C
Most
difficult thing for me is about my energy. After two rounds interview,
Im kind of tired and I cant focus on the last round. And the tricky
thing is Ill have to write code on a whiteboard and which will be taken
a picture by interviewers. I havent practiced before so that my
writing messed up.
What position would you like to work as?
There
werent any specific questions for the onsite but I would say know
your data structures very well if you want to succeed.
I didnt encounter any difficult or unexpected questions and I was
prepared for them!
Programming assignment.
What would do you to find out if icecream will sell in Denmark or not.
Know the values of Amazon that are listed. Be real, they like you to
challenge.
Whats the difference between the stack and heap when they are
initialized.
Problems
solving with coding on a whiteboard, including algorithms (binary
search, DFS) and data structure (hash table, binary search tree,
graph).
Design problems (restaurant reservation system) and distributed
system
(map-reduce and distributed has table). Some behavioral questions.
Difficult
2)
Given a log file which consists of timestamp, customer ID, page id
visited by that particular customer. Write a function to return all
customers who have visited 5 unique pages in last 30 mins
In
general have the details for your answers. What were the results, how
did you gather data. It will be very obvious to the interviewer if
youre not being truthful because they will ask specific follow up
questions.
There
are a lot of questions that can be solved by arrays, sorting can be
done in O(nlogn) but they are looking for more than just correct
answers, having an answer with a high time / space complexity wont
help
you.There was a tough question about linked lists with next and
arbitrary pointers.
What is your biggest fault and why?
Canned
behavioral questions. Additionally, Imagine stuff like your high school
retail job. Tell me a time you dealt with an upset customer Tell me
how important customer service is to you
First
question was to find all numbers that occurred an odd-number of times
in an array and second question was implement a stack that could
return
the largest number in the stack at anytime.
First
question was to compare two lists and print the common elements.
Simple
question, but I wasnt explaining my idea. They are looking for your
thought process. Regardless if your answer is right or wrong. they are
checking if you can think in the right manner. I didnt talk much or
explain and just wrote the code. BIG MISTAKE! The second question I
had
to make a dictionary, which was not too hard. I got stuck a couple of
places and they helped me out. But try to keep them engaged as you
write
code. Explain what your thinking or the ways you want to do it.
Did you check our website for other careers?-Where there any other
jobs you saw you were interested in?
How you would handle situations.
Classic interview question about matrixes sorted row and column wise.

Discuss metrics for gauging product success. How do you define

success. What data do you use to support.
How did you handle the disagreement with your boss over
Wasnt expecting the math problem but it was straight forward and
simple to work through,
Nothing difficult.
I
was asked a lot of situational question and I was not prepared for it. I
mostly prepared on data structures, programming and algorithms.
There
were 2 coding questions. First was to extend a class that contained the
names and ratings of movies so as to get a list of similar movies and
the movie name with the highest rating. Second question was pretty
simple, given an array of integers, print first two numbers that sum
upto 10.
Aside from tell me about yourself, all questions were behavioral in
nature
Walk me through your routine day at your current job.
Most
of the questions werent all that difficult and there was very little
pressure in solving them. The point was really to see the process of
arriving at your answer. The most difficult question was to explain the
cardinality of depth first and breadth first search and explain how the
algorithms could be written. I actually missed that one as I havent
looked at a text book in years. The question I remembered most was
the
one about having 2 eggs and dropping them off a 100 story building to
determine at what floor they begin to break. What is the least amount
of
attempts required to determine this answer?
write
a function that takes in an int and returns a string that would be how
one would say that number (ex: 123 -> one hundred twenty three;
50019
-> five thousand nineteen).
No questions were asked since interviews were not required.
Why did you choose Amazon?
What type of business would you start?
The questions were pretty simple and straightforward.- Make a
function to test whether a number is a binary palindrome.- Make a
hotdog ordering system.- another that I cant remember.

Given a binary tree and a number, return true if the tree has a
root-to-leaf path such that adding up all the values along the path
equals the given number. Return false if no such path can be found.-
How do u know if a number is divisible by 8? (hinted to use a binary
operator and NOT % or the subtraction approach)
How to control concurrency in web application
Design an online book reader system
Nothing unexpected actually
two algorithm questions, one of them is given a string, substitute
special chars. give all possible results. like substitute a and o from
amazon, then the possible answer should be:AmAzon, amazOn,
AmAzOn
4 Basic questionsWhat would you do if your employees are not
following a standardise procedure?Why do you want to work for
amazon?Math problem?ask the recruiter to explain well the problems
in order they see how you interact with themUnderstand the
leadership principlesBe yourself and relax
Recall a time in a previous job in which you and a coworker disagreed,
what did you do and why?
Nothing unexpected.
How to design a storage system
I
expected the question name a time when you had to work with
ambiguity,
what did you do?. However, it was phrased name a time when you
had to
make a decision with little or no information. I guess I got stumped
after being there for five hours..my fault!!!!
I
dont think anything was really difficult or unexpected. I really,
really prepared though. I spent hours typing out different experiences
that went with different Amazon Leadership principles and researching
typical behavioral interview questions. I went into the interview very,
very prepared.
How did you deal with a difficult employee- wha tdid you do to turn
them around?Discuss a project that did not go well or went over
budget?Discuss
a time with you had to make a call on your own without your
supervisors
discussing it with youwas there a financial impact? what was it? how
did it go?
Given a set of points (x,y) and an integer n, return n number of
points which are close to the origin
you
need to write the code correctly without IDEs help and be able to
know
the time complexity of the data structure you are going to use, even
though the data structure might be Java JDK, you still need to know the
complexity
All the question were basic coding question. They asked me to the
implete a simpler version of a mine sweeper game.
Asked two questions1. sort using sliding window2. binary search
functional program
I
was referred by a friend, I was giving coding problem to solve online.
The problem is not timed but they expect you to finish within two
hours,
and the session is recorded for review. You have to code online. One of
the developers will review the code and also watch a video to see how
you solved the problem. I did not finish it in two hours.The
question:Implement
a class with 3 public methods that operate on a common set of data.
These functions record the weight of boxes and allow users to find the
weight of a box at a given percentile. the functions have the following
signature.void writes(string boxId, Double weight);Double
getWeightByboxId(String BoxID);Double getWeightAtPercentile(Double
Percentile);I have a solution but let see what others will do
given an integer, output all the prime factors of that integer, ex:input:
6, output: 2,3input 25, output: 5, 5given an integer array, output all
the numbers that appear odd number of times, ex:input:
1,2,1,3,3,4output: 2, 4
What would you do when you finish your work and theres nothing to
do?
1. Two different interviewer asked the same coding question(two sum
problem), change for another after I point out.2. Implement a generic
get sum of array class for certain class (e.g ), which I almost forget.
Two whiteboard coding questions. One about BST and one about string
manipulation.
(1) two sums : given a list of numbers, return the indexes of two values
whose sum is a given value. (2) Revers a string list s (2)
the questions were straight forward. the toughest one of the three was
regarding linked lists
I was asked a case study question about how to handle a situation
where a worker arrived late to work.
What value will you add?
i
faced difficulty while writing the code as I have to explain him what I
was doing at the same time.A little bit of practise would have helped.
Nothing too difficult. Just be very specific to your answers
The
questions were straight forward, a linked list question, a string
question and an algorithm question, no surprises just standard
questions. The first interviewer had me write code in C++, the second
one said he did not care very much about syntax.
Memory management
Have you ever fired someone?
I
signed a non-disclosure agreement so I cant give specific details on
the questions asked. My piece of advice is to be prepared to answer
several behavioral based questions. Provide good examples of how
you
completed a task and what the result was.
How to find if a a graph is 2-colorable or not? Code it.
tell
me about a time that something was outside of your control, what did
you do? You have to manage 150 people, what do you do?
What do you do when people say no to you
Non-disclosure Agreement covers these questions.Recommendation:
fully outline your plan in comments before writing code. If you do not
finish, or your code does not work correctly, there will be a record of
what you intended.Standard review of algorithms and data structures
is good, but also practice writing, running, and testing code.
Tell me about any process youre familiar with and what youd do to
improve it.
None. However I have most of my work ex in teradata and they were
looking for Oracle experts. e.g. Indexes in Oracle
Amazon wants to start selling hoverboards. What are the pricing
metrics and how should we determine how many to order?
There was none.
Given a amount of money, write code to show how many ways there
are to represent that quantity with coins.
Math flow problem having to do with labor utilization and process flow.

Find the subarray with the largest sum given an unsorted array of
positive and negative numbers.
There were questions on Binary search trees, hash
maps/tables/functions, complexity, recursion and other data
structures.
question about regular expression
How would you market a new line of products that would be shipped in
a box once a month every month?
the questions were unexpected, but not hard.
Nothing particularly hard.
Based
upon given programming language(s), there were questions for which
a
person had to read some code, debug the algorithm, and provide a
correction. This was used to test a persons proficiency with the
language as well as their thought process on the problem.
Mostly questions about Amazons Leadership dimensions. The a couple
math questions (same questions found on glass door.com)
I
cannot disclose specific questions due to NDA. However, just get ready
and feel comfortable with basic CS (algorithms, data structures, OO
design). Make sure you can cleanly write code for simple, well-known
problems, and that you can explain in few words these concepts.
Not too difficult. Some tree and array problems.
Math Flow question was very surprising.
Given a triangle of integers, find the path of the largest sum without
skipping.
Difference between outer join/inner join, where/having.
Given a log of users visit to a site for a day, how would you find
returning users given the log visit for another day
The
match question can be tricky if youre not good with percentages. I
had
to manually hand jam it because it was a bit too early for my brain to
work right but I got the right answer.
1.find intersections of two sets2.given a number list, output the sum of
numbers within a window3. student test score
Tell
me about a time when x 100 and its usually something negative
(you
faced a challenge, did not get along with a co-worker, disagreed with a
manager, etc.).
could not remember a particular one. most of them are not easy.
Why do you want to work for amazon?
The same one that gets everyone; Tell me about your most difficult
call and how did you handle it.
Walk me through how Amazon Kindle books would be priced.
There
wasnt one specific question that was most difficult, but it was the
amount of additional probing that several of the loop panelists
continually pursued. Although this was a management position, there
was a
significant obsession with actual engineering metrics and
measurements
used in decision making. A couple of the interviews seemed to be
wanting
to create conflict in the interview all the while they pounded away my
answers on their laptops which was extremely annoying. The process
really lacked an actual personal interest in the candidate.
business case: we noticed that there was a decrease in sales in this
category by X amount over the past month, what caused it?
There werent any difficult or unexpected questions
mostly questions on AWS
Implement
a stack that supports push, pop and mode(the one from statistics)
operation. Gave an O(log n ) push and pop and O(1) mode
operation.Another good question was implement atoi function. I
assumed
it as base 10 but was asked to support from binary to any base
numbers(even base 50).
None
really. Several posts on Glassdoor provide the questions describe
most difficult decision, talk about Amazon values, working with teams
etc
It is not pleasant
You
go into the elevator and the CEO of a company Amazon wants to work
with
is there. Give me a 30 second pitch you would give him to get business
from them. Second Round was 4, 45 minute interviews with different
product managers at amazon. If you do badly in one you are basically
done. I think all four of them have to say yes in order for you to get
an offer. Its hard. They are very behavioral and ask about negotiations
skills, teamwork, you must be metric oriented, etc. Its one of the
toughest companies to interview with.
What work achievement are you most proud of?
Told me to write a whole data structure with certain features.
No questions particularly difficult: graph path finding, binary search
tree, design a chess game
Design an LRU cache
1)
Input: An integer. O/P: reverse the byte order(not the bits, reverse
each byte order, i.e. order of 1s and 0s should not change within each
byte) and display the number.2) Find and display all anagrams of a
given string. This one is nothing but permutation of a string.
None
of the questions were hard. Just asked if I was familiar with the
safety rules associated with the kind of work I was applying for.
Find all factor of a large number.
Tell me about yourself in two sentences.
What if there are some boundary cases?
Asked
to write a method were its passed an array of numbers and a single
number. I needed to return true if there was two numbers in the array
that if added totaled the single number. I was then asked to rewrite it
to make it run faster.
in the onsite, be prepared about behavioral questions. Be sure to read
the Amazon leadership statement before your onsite.
I
interviewed for retail program, while every small case was about
operation/supply chain, which I had no experience and no clue.
Questions
from interview #1: Describe a hash table to a regular person, some
general OO questions, determine whether a BSTs nodes are in-order
(interview was a long time ago but the question was something about
in-order nodes).Interview #2: Binary tree vs. Binary Search
Tree, more OO questions, write a function to determine whether or not
a
tree was a binary search tree and how would you test it.
Generate all possible solutions to an n by n sudoku board
Java questions
Coding question. Asked to code on a shared online document.
Why was the answer the most efficient
Serialize/ Deserialize a binary tree.
Few of the questions regarding the complexity were little tricky.
Implement a T9 dictionary
What do you consider to be your greatest weakness?
Nothing too hard
Basic coding and algorithms.
you
and an opponent take turns choosing numbers either the first or the
last element in an unsorted array , and all numbers are exhausted,
winner will be the one who gets larger cumulative total sum of picked
numbers. Code up the algorithm that player 1 will be the winner.
Player 2
also has same strategy as player 1
Array manipulation. Pretty easy.
All questions were by level of my skills.
None really, although interviewer seemed surprised to learn how small
Amazon really was in the industry.
Given
a keyword (ex: abc) and a list of words (ex: aabc, cab, ab),
write a function that will return all words in the list that are the
same/anagrams of the keyword. In this case, cab would be the only
word
returned. Later changes to the function were added: numbers and
symbols
might be included in the words but were to be ignored (ca2b still
matched abc), make the function not case sensitive (A == a),
etc
Given a mathematical expression, what data structure would you use
to evaluate the expression?How would you design the above question
to use Trees/Graphs.
Nothing too difficult or unexpected
The
questions just to get hired for temporary are easy. Now if you want to
become permanent and move into Management they ask you
questions about
the companies Leadership principles and you have to give very
specific
examples just for starts.. very difficult promotion process
Name a time you overcame a challenge.
Find the youngest common ancestor in a directed graph, where you
can only go to a nodes parent and cannot go back
It
was a difficult and awkward process because you see yourself on the
camera and also you only get 30 seconds to read the question,
understand
it, and answer. The whole process was a bit stressful. The questions
were not out of context nor did I have any unexpected questions. That
is
the only positive thing about this video interview. If you study common
questions for your field you should be good to answer and not be
caught
off guard.
A
wired question about final for interface. Actually, there is no final
interface. Some challenge questions like to write code in a limited
paper space.
not normal data structure and algo problem
Most difficult problem youve solved.
Amazon graph question
How did you manage to land your previous job?
Design Question
Are you willing to work Christmas?
find the common ancestor of two nodes using the interface.
Tell me about a time that you had to deal with ambiguity.
Write out a function that takes in a string as an argument and returns
the char that appears most frequently in that string.
Binary Search Tree where each node knows its parent and the leaf
nodes are in a linked list. Print the in order traversal.
Technical Question. Given a string such as 3 + 2 / 5 3 * 4, calculate it.

Design an automation test framework for end to end user case testing

Hashing,
data structures, and design questions. They also asked me if i took the
algorithms class, then they proceeded to ask me about NP-Complete
problems etc. They were very nice overall. I recommend getting a
good
cell phone reception and internet access before the interview, because
my call kept dropping on me during the interview. It dropped at least 6
times during my first technical interview, and I think they werent
happy about it, therefore I was sent to a third technical interview.
Find top 10 occurring words in a page.
The questions were something on the lines of,- Given a tree, output
levelwise nodes (Ans: It was actually the BFS algorithm, but I didnt
realize it at that time)- Find first unique substring (In O(n)) (Ans: Use
counting sort variant)-
Convert an array into balanced binary search tree (Ans: First sort the
array, then use recursive algorithm after splitting the array at mid,
and using the mid as a node)- From two arrays N and M find the
combinations that add up to say X (Ans: I was drained by the time
second
interview started, so the only answer I came up with was of O(n2)
complexity i.e. using two FOR loops)
Write an algorithm to tell if a given tree is a mirror
Three
questions, all technical. The first two were about basic data structure
and algorithm. The third one was a programming problem through an
online coding platform.
DP, Bit manipulation
First interviewer asked what problem I wanted to solve (general, not
even coding based, but it took me by surprise)
Find two integers in an unsorted array that produced a certain sum in
linear time.
How would I handle a stress call when the error was the companys
fault?
There
was nothing difficult question. However, there was an unusual
question
when a senior engineer asked me to generate a mathematical formula.
I
didnt expect this in interview for a company like Amazon.
Basic data structure questions. LL, HashTable, BTGiven
an array of ints, sum up all the even numbers and print it. Then return
true if any number in the array is evenly divisible by 7, false
otherwise.Given a two words, write a function/method to determine if
they are anagramsGiven
a singly linked list, split that into two lists one containing just the
elements in odd position and another containing just the elements in
even position.
First:1) Find out if theres a loop in a linked list2) Reverse all words(not
characters in each word) in a string3) Design a parking lotSecond:1)
Given a node, find its successor node in a BST(follow ups: in place,
with or without root node, parent node)2) Given str1 and str2, find if
they are rotated strings of each other
none
1. Ask about your previous programming experience.2. Network
knowledge. eg. what does http:// mean.3.
Write codes data structure problem for me: design a system to store
and manage songs of a specific music team, given songs names. You
also
need to provide various functions, e.g. sort, insert
Read from file and find top ten most occuring words in file
They
asked a lot of questions and followed up by asking how my
contribution
helped the company, specifically looking for x% cost reduced, sales
increased, etc. They also asked a math flow question and a behavioral
what-would-you-do scenario question.
Before
the interview, I thought the questions should be very easy because it
was only an internship interview. However, obviously I was wrong and
didnt perform well in the interview. Be prepared!
The questions were on:1) Hashtable,Worst case complexity, Average
case complexity2) Binary Search Tree,Worst case complexity, Average
case complexity3) Write an efficient program to print the numbers
whose sum is 10. Find the complexity.4) Binary Search,Worst case
complexity, Average case complexity5) Which is the Best sort and
search algorithm6) Design a Furniture store with Wooden Chair
Wooden Table, Steel Chair Steel Tableand test for fire and water7)
Write a recursive program for dividing numbers without the /
operator8) WAP to find if given graph has cycles
If
one of the production lines went down, a server went down, and your
bosss laptop needs to be fixed all at the same time how would you
prioritize each of these tasks in order of most important to least
important?
The
most difficult question was the case question. If you do the online
recorded first initial interview, the case question is similar to that
The
second round of interview I was asked to calculate the product of three
highest numbers in an array. The interviewer kept further questioning
me about giving a more generalized answer.
In
the final round, I was given a pricing strategy question to complete on
Excel which I had difficulty with because I did not know the excel
function needed to compile the raw data I was given. Make sure you
know
your excel functions before heading into the interview.
Although the job title is Computer Vision Engineer, the questions
were about data structure concept.
Walk me through the process you use to plan a complex project from
start to finish.
Have no Questions.
As
was all the rage back then, I got asked a couple brain twister and
What would you be if money was no object kind of questions.
Amazon has decided to compete directly with Netflix. Design the
system (top to bottom) that will help us win the battle.
The most unexpected question for me was about networking:Given
two IP addresses and one subnet mask as input (All are string data
type), write a function to determine whether the two IP addresses are
in
the same subnet.
its
easy to make rate in the area, your always in. But that day your 2nd
written is about to come off, there put you somewhere else. Then a
week
later your in the HR dept. puzzled. Now you have your 3rd finally, you
work back in your normal area for a few more days. Then they put you
some where else for 2 days. A week later your back in HR. Your being
fried.
test question
simple
questions find a substring of a string and design a library system.
You are supposed to ask questions for the latter and clarify the
functionality and requirements
No specific question. Just rude, abrupt and lacking interpersonal skills.

Just algorithmic and data structure questions.

None
were really unexpected as they were all your typical behavior based
questions except with the added twist of being data and metrics
driven.
Example: tell me about a time you analyzed historical data to make a
process betteretc.
no hard questions.
In
the interview, I was asked about why do I think I am best suited for
this job, couple of questions about my experience at my past
employers ,
one question about a bullet point on my resume, one question
regarding
processes that Ive improved in my career, my leadership style.
Was asked a design problem for a large scale web service.
Some
internal jargon about how would you rank vendors based on the reams
of
data collected on customer orders. Gave her a good answer on this
one
but she wanted more and more and more. Then no reaction onto
next Q.
I never expected that they will ask a direct question regarding the
complexities.
Find all black regions on image, flood algorithm. OO design a address
book.
Some
data structures and algorithm questions. Questions were mainly on
linked list and questions like write a routine to reverse every k nodes
in a given linked list
Apply power function. Basic algorithms.
How do decide to move forward with a project or not?
Many questions about software design in the second phone interview.
How to optimize the staffing and efficiency of a restaurant
could i bring in a copy of my college degree?
How is your teamwork?
design a shopping cart
All
the questions seemed pretty straight forward. I didnt make it to the
in person interview, which is where I suppose the hardball begins.
Situational
question regarding 2 employees that consistently arrive late for work.
You discipline the employee under you, but the other employee is not
disciplined by another manager. How do you handle this situation?
Your
employee keeps bothering and telling you that the other employee is
not
getting disciplined by their manager.
Given
a list of numbers, in which every number occurs an even number of
times
except one number, which occurs an odd number of times, return the
value of the odd number. Question should be done with a hash map
but I
used a n log n solution.
Tell me about how you dealt with a mistake you have made?How do
you handle missing a deadline?
If
you were on a team where you were designing a new type of service
for
the company to offer its customers, what are some things you would
think
about?
Write
a function that converts an int into its alpha-numeric equivalent
represented as a null terminated string. The function should accept an
int as input and return a string as output. For instance, calling the
function with an int value of 324 would return a null terminated string
containing 324. Ensure that your function checks for appropriate
boundary conditions and edge cases. Assume you cannot use any
standard
libraries (for example, no itoa or sprintf).
-Write a method that prints out an in order traversal of a binary tree
I
was asked to count occurrences of an integer in a given sorted array. I
had to optimize for time and take care of corner cases.
how do you make decision when necessary info is absent.
I
realized during the interviews that we might have had a
miscommunication. Some of the interviewers expected me to have a
stronger technical background. When I pointed out to them that I dont
and that Id been very upfront with the recruiters about this potential
skill gap they seemed a bit surprised.
Question 1:Setup:Assume primitive Facebook. FB has Members.class
Member { String name; String email; List friends;}Question
A:Code printSocialGraph(Member m). Direct friends of m are Level 1
friends. Friends of friends are level 2 friends..and so onPrint level 1
friends first. Then print level 2 friends.and so onEnumerate test
cases to verify the implementation is correct.Question 2:Write
a function that converts an int into its alpha-numeric equivalent
represented as a null terminated string. The function should accept an
int as input and return a string as output. For instance, calling the
function with an int value of 324 would return a null terminated string
containing 324. Ensure that your function checks for appropriate
boundary conditions and edge cases. Assume you cannot use any
standard
libraries (for example, no itoa or sprintf).Write out test cases to verify
your code is working correctly.Question 3:Lets
say were developing a vector graphics application. It will allow the
user to create lines, rectangles, circles, text, etc. and manipulate
them independently move them, re-size them, etc. Design an object
model for this application.
They
asked a lot about my job history, and how I made things scale. (Which
was basically a load balancer, and sharding). When asked very
specifically about how to scale something beyond that this didnt seem
to suffice for an answer.
make a function given that will receive two arrays find and return the
union using array list
Not
overly difficult, but the recruiter asked about managing WAN links,
which is where my skills fell short of their requirements (I think).
String reversal. Merge LinkedList. OOD. Find duplicates. Prime
numbers. Tree serialization.
k closest points to origin out of N on a map
Give an example about a task you cannot complete even with your co-
workers help
none all behavioural
Most difficult for me was:Write
code to Given a list of numbers, return a list of all possible
permutations. eg. given {1,2,3}, return
{{},{1},{2},{3},{1,2},,{1,2,3}}Had to use bit manipulation where I
fumbled.
What
data structures you would like to use to store texts of a text editor
that you can do some operations like insert, modify and remove.
If you can understand how the game performs, you will find answer
very quickly. s (9)
Take two arrays of values and find the intersection between them.
Most efficient way. Recursive functions.
What can we add to our website to make it better?
The most difficult questions were on the F2F with more
technical/programming questions.
Print a random line
Questions were of average difficulty
Sometimes the interviewer would not talk, but it is to let you do all the
talking.
Write code to find the next least node in a binary search tree given a
node.
Given two sorted arrays how would you combine them into one sorted
array.Further: Given a list of K sorted arrays of average length N, how
would you combine them into one sorted array.
Calculate units per week
Read Cracking the coding interview to prepare. Nothing outside of
expectations
Many
programming questions on a white board. Both coding and design
questions as well as general computer science questions about data
structures.
None. I was prepared. Know the core competencies.
Think of a time when everyone reached consensus about an idea, but
you didnt agree with it?
Nothing
was difficult. All were general questions based on Hashtable, Sorting,
OOPS concept. 1) Given list of elements find if it contains duplicates.2)
Explain inheritance.3) What is difference between int & Integer.4)
Given file containing IP addresses hitting amazon servers, find ip
address with maximum traffic.5) How Hashtables work?6) Some
behavior questions.
Tell me about a time where you made a business decision that you
regret.
Here is what we do, now guess what I want.
Three
algorithm questions within an hour and half. Pretty basis questions
about linked list, array list, and a dynamic programming question
about a
two dimensional array.
What has been your greatest accomplishment and why?
There was one case question in the first interview about how to price a
vacuum warranty
find all possible combinations to get a particular sum from an array
Some questions on removing duplicates from a linked list, generally
doable
They asked about AWS and gave a use case about Big data.
In
my interview, the director asked about evaluating the effectiveness of
my time as a Big Brother, through BBBS which he found on my
LinkedIn
page. Pretty shady, in my opinion, but just be prepared to answer
analytically, anything that you list publicly (although Im sure
social media does not count).
I think the most difficult thing is not the questions from interviewers; it
is myself.Basically, if you have used the common data structures and
algorithms, you can handle those questions without nervous.
The interview questions werent that difficult.
Had not started phone interview
Nothing very hard.
Find the longest repeating substring of a given string. For example,
given banana, the longest repeating substring is ana.OOD, desgin
Black Jack.
The whole process involves a lot of data structure usage
open
questions on their new business and service, tell them your opinion
and
how to improve and verify the new service idea is workable or not
To find least common ancestor in a binary search tree s (2)
Tell
me a time when you have an employee how did not meet your
expectations
and describe what you did about this situation. How much do you
know
about Amazon / our operations here in this city.
The questions are the usual fare, and Ive done this before, so I wasnt
really unprepared.
the string related question on java was the toughest
Questions asked in Second round was unexpected. I was expecting
programming questions.
Providing an example of project that did not go as well as I expected.
Design elevator systems using OO design.
Have two discus sion with the interviewer. Mainly about how you
design the code and how you resolve the problem
What are the things you did not like about your last job.
Online assesement1)Code to merge a 2 sorted linked lists2)find the
duplicates in an array3)Given a 2d matrix print the path with the
maximum score form 00 to m*n
one case questions pure behavior after that
Find whether tree is symmetric or not
The most difficult part was the most efficient algorithm
All were irrelevant for my role.
Adler style One Question Interview, Full Quant Case Interview
Nothing unexpected. If you read this site you will see that others have
had the exact questions I got.
Graph
problem: I write out the pseudo-code for solution by interation not
recursion, but the interviewer spent a lot of time to understand it.
Maybe my fault. Maybe he expected the recursion solution.
Where the linked list is not used and why?
It was question related to a project we were working on.
Implement insert and delete for a trinary tree.
Describe how recursion isnt always efficient. s (3)
Walk me through a multiple priority situation
I did not have a difficult or unexpected question. every question was
basic, an incredibly easy interview to prepare for
Question regarding how to retrieve the second highest repeated
number in arraythe second question was how to print the nodes of
binary tree level wise
Tell me about a time you had to make a decision without a supervisors
approval?General Forecasting questions, Examples of
data/spreadsheet work
All
the basic questions and couple of coding assignment over collabedit,
asked to design a data stucture to represent a game environment and
then
for a dictionary.
What is your definition of ownership?
If an employee was cleaning a process incorrectly (not following proper
protocol), what should I do.
No difficult questions, really. Tricky in a way maybe, if you miss a
detail, but if you are alert, you will sail through.
Determine if a linked list contains any loops
All questions are technical including 1 coding question at end of each
interview
A lot to questions involving has tables and trees
How would you force a supplier (e.g. Nintendo, Sony) to sell more
products on Amazon.com
Write a program that merges two Linked Lists
Nothing
unexpected or out of the blue. The question topic included Linked List,
Binary Search Tree, HashMap and Bit Manipulation. Although tricky,
questions were doable in given amount of time
Imagine
a data structure similar to a Binary Tree except, rather than each node
pointing to is lchild and rchild, it only points to its parent. Write a
function that, given two nodes into such a structure, returns their
Lowest Common Ancestor the lowest node in the tree which where
both
subtrees meet.
Whats the biggest or craziest idea youve proposed to a manager
The question is common to see but you should prepare it well before
the interview.
1. Given a number (not necessarily of type int), find if it is 2^n. What
is the complexity?2.
Given a set of points represented by x and y coordinates, find out the
first k points that are closest to the origin. What is the complexity?3.
Given an array of integers, return the largest occurrence element
times
its array index. Do it in place. What is the complexity?4. Given a binary
tree(not necessarily BST), return the sum of all kth level nodes. What is
the complexity?
The
fact that I was to regurgitate all information about Amazons core
principles instead of having an opinion of my own when asked about
why I
wanted to work at Amazon.
Design a database for an e-commerce web site.
nothing particularly difficult
I was asked to describe a sales study I had implemented at my current
job.
Test our current web site.
Something related to binary tree which I dont really remember
Questions were just technical questions not really hard questions..
easy questions, how to reverse a string, iteratively and recursively,
and given an integer in base 10, convert to a given base
it
is basic algorithms. The first is a sort algorithm. There is an array
with a million integer. The integers length is 10 bit. Find an
algorithm with run complexity of N. The second is about detect if there
is any circle in a linkelist
Make sure to know the big 0 for the worst case and average cases for
different sorting algorithms.
1.reverse
a string word by word and there may be multiple whitespace between
two
word, keep exactly the same whitespace when reverse string by
word2.find all prime number less than the give input k
BST Linked List
Pretty simple questions on basic data structures, OOP and a couple of
coding problems.
The
questions are pretty regular, but the second interviewer suppressed
my
proposals and made me think in his approach. We kind of had some
conflict, but I have to admit his algorithm is easier to
implement.Remember: do not try to be a smart ass in front of your
interviewer.
Its
a Maze solver question. You r given a maze (up to you to design in any
data structure you want), a start point, a end point. And you r required
to find only one path from start to end. The time efficiency of your
method is the only concern in this situation
I
was told that I would be having the technical interview for the third
one, but it was actually the personal interview. I should have been
ready for that, but I was not really ready.
annoying
technical question by someone who spoke bad English was asked that
was
better suited to actually sitting at computer and developing it, as
opposed to trying to write it on paper and tell the person over the
phone.
Describe the system architecture for a recommendation engine based
on a customers previous shopping history.
The math curveball question, as others have stated was tough!
very easy ones, i think thats why i failed.
Questions given by HR Manager s (2)
They asked standard data structure questions. For example, search
times and design decisions.
If
you were to discount 10 DVDs for a certain in-store promotion, how
would you pick the DVDs and how would you measure the events
success?
It
was a purely technical interview. Questions about algorithms and
coding
were asked and some code practice. I was asked about solving a maze,
the Fibonacci sequence, and Linked List for coding. I also was asked
how
to test my functions. I was also asked about memory efficiency and the
Big O of my functions. I was asked some definitions of programming. In
my second interview I was asked more low level stuff such as about
processors and threads. I was also asked to explain the difference
between programming languages and hardware description languages
and
various question of how hardware description languages are
implemented.
Why Amazon?
Divide without the / operator. s (3)
Nothing unexpected.
Tell me of a time when you were wrong
Copying a tree
Nothing difficult, they just want to see if youre passionate and have
the drive.
The
questions were typical administrative questions. They expect actual
answers to all of the questions, so none of the typical answers apply.
Also, they expect you to ask alot of questions, relevant to you
choosing
whether amazon is right for you or not.
Second Round:This
was a bit difficult. The question is to generate sample math
problems(additions) for a 8th grade student and the results should be
stored in such a way that they can be printed when required. Sample
problem is 7+8=_____The constraints are:-1) The numbers that are to
be added should be <=92) The result should be <=17 s (2)
SQL Performance tuning questions
Traverse
a binary search tree, verify whether a given tree is a binary search
tree or not. Not the most difficult question, but make sure to know the
details.
Tell about a time that you disagreed with a manager and what was the
outcome?
Quite easy question i suppose- Emulate inorder BST tree traversal
without using recursion.
If you were given a magic wand, what is one thing you would change
in your current job and how would you go about changing it
Most questions are on the cracking interview book.
You have been given an matrix of characters 5*5 which contains 24
elements a..y the matrix will look something like a b c d e f g h i
j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x yYou have been given alpha (starting
character) and beta (Ending character) as two characters.You have to
find all shortest paths between alpha and beta with a restriction that
you are allowed to movevertical or horizontal.
Talk thru in detail steps to develop a new web page.
Given a number, how to find a closest number in a series of floating
point data.
Technical
Question: Given the following list of integers, how would you sort it
the most efficiently and weed out duplicates at the same time?
one question is to find a path in a maze
Find top k largest numbers in array in O(n) time s (3)
Everything was pretty standard and by the book
A puzzle which had to be solved using an algorithm and also write
code for the same
No
difficult questions, your typical what did/would you do in this type of
situation. Interview was conducted 1:1 with someone from HR in a
room
with other applicants.
No extreme questions were asked, they were pretty good at trying to
figure out what I actually know based on my experience.
What
is your favorite book? If presented with the option to send out a
marketing email for this book, would you or would you not? Why? If
you
decided to send one out, what would you include in the email, who
would
you send it to, how would you decide on all of these things, and which
metrics would you use to analyze if the email was a success?
Lots
of small cases such as problem solving questions and how do u make a
decision questions. Behavior questions are tough as well.
I
was asked two questions how will you know which is the starting
point
in a circular linked list (write a program) and write a program to
return two numbers from a function to the main
they were not difficult questions though they look at your thinking
process more
An
arrays of integers is there which has all elements present odd number
of times, only one element is present even number of times, find the
number.
Evolving around the news and what your thoughts are about this/ what
you would do differently
Find total number of nodes at level K.
Cant
tell the exact questions due to NDA. However, questions were based
on
data structures, sorting algorithms, object oriented design.
They asked specifics about Amazon Prime and why they chose to
provide that service.
The question in which i need to find whether two given binary trees are
identical are not.
In-place array reversal, level-order binary tree traversal, reading two
files and outputting strings common to both.
The
most difficult questions were the softer questions. Like how you work
with a difficult co-worker, what happens if you find a project will be
behind, etc.
Write
a multi-table join query to select some data but the schema on the
printout was missing a required table and didnt have proper identity
fields, and the interviewer didnt seem to understand my explanation
that it wasnt possible to get the answer without first modifying the
schema. Almost like that particular interviewer didnt know sql.
Sorting in linear time
Think of a time when you had to make a difficult decision or chose to
go against the grain at work. How did you deal with it?
None really. Probably how Id engage students.
Given
an int K and a list of 2-D (x,y) points, write a piece of code that
will return the K closest points to the origin (which is the point(0,0))
The last/hardest question I was asked was how to do an in order tree
traversal.
Given
two different strings, find the common characters between the two. For
example if string A is hello and string B is elbow the common
characters would be [e, l, o]. Give a method that returns unique
or duplicate entries. s (2)
not much difficult
What is your proudest accomplishment? (This was only difficult
because it was the EXACT same question I got in my 1st interview)
Mostly
behavioral based questions and they asked specific examples or
extensions based off of your responses. How did that look for you? Tell
me more about this. Most difficult for me was At Amazon we have
things
that need to be completed in a short amount of time and there is not
always time to get it accomplished. How far would you go to ensure
something is completed?
How do you lead under-performing teams to achieve expected results
write a program to connect two people in a social network.
questions
were fairly easy. nothing unexpected. the programming question I got
was to check if a number is a power of 2 or not. Not heard back yet. so
waiting for a decision.
I did not find that they asked any really tough questions.
Very
specific, hypothetical questions regarding detailed technical scenarios
asking the candidate how to best respond to the scenario and mitigate
the problem/find a solution.
In what ways do you dive deep into your work and projects.
I
was asked how I would find new products for Amazon to sell, which
wouldnt have been a difficult question if a specific answer werent
expected.
The search box question above seems to have no right answers.
What is the difference between wholesale and retail pricing?
Any other ways to do this problem, and why and how
How to identify defected products from an Amazon FC which arent
labelled by the supplier ?
Implementing
least-recently-used cache. Because I didnt have experience with
cache
techniques, so I got an awkward moment with the interviewee
explaining
the LRU cache.
Most difficult experience at work that resulted in a personal job
performance being recognized for a good job.
Write a function to remove all redundant characters in a given string.
s (3)
A
lot of questions on delivering results. One question breeds 6 or so
follow up questions with poking and prodding on my analytical,
program
and collaborative skills.
role play for giving feed-back, i had never been in a leadership role
before so I didnt know how to asses the situation
How would you determine the right amount of iPad accessories to sell
next quarter?
Array Manipulations, problems involving subsets.
Combinations of nodes in BST based on the sum. Like display all the
nodes whose key values sum to 10
As
per the NDA, I will not provide specifics, but just think about the
types of problems that an Amazon.com engineer might have to solve,
because the interview problem is almost always a core production
problem.
strengths and weaknesses, how do you view safety.
Tell me about a situation in which you used data to solve a problem
Every
question was centered around providing exact examples of when you
have
used different technology suites to accomplish job. They want you to
be
very precises. So make sure to really think of not just how to answer
the question but do it with an example, and dont talk for more than 2
minutes per questions.
One
question that struck me by surprise was being position which I was
applying for. Product manager of Technical Program manager.
None, really, but at that time, I found the BBS question tough.
No unusual questions. Basic data structures and some programming
concepts.
Bar-raiser
was difficult and unexpected (to me) as Im from embedded
application
dev background and havent dealt with such scenarios. s (3)
Not many difficult questions
What is the Big O for this algorithm
Design a database that fit specific criteria.
All questions were easy
Asking about Unix commands (I had no prior experience with Unix-
based machines).
What would you wish to improve if you were to start the project again?

Too many to list but be confident in yourself and do not try to BS your
way. That might work at Microsoft but not here.
difficult programming and logical problem
Sorting Algorithms and optimization. For a Senior SW QA Management
position ?
All the questions are sort of textbook problems, relatively easy.
What was your worst day at work, whywhat could YOU have done
to avoid it and what can you do to avoid it in the future
Give an example of how you used measurement to change a strategy,
and include the numerical results you saw.
Abstract class vs interface in Java
Worry about recursion and different types of trees.
Implementing a Web Cache system, with LRU policy
Most
difficult: Describe how you would solve a work problem in which you
have no experience/knowledge in? (i.e. setting up a bank account)
Questions
were not that difficult to answer but the overall structure of the
process was interesting. The second or third person was trying to
upset
or challenge me through insult or any other method. Met with two
directors one was asking the questions and the other taking notes.
Felt like one was there to ask questions and the other was there to be
a
distraction. As well, I was given vague, hypothetical situations and
asked what I would do.
Most of the questions were pretty standard fare informational
interview questions.
There
werent really any difficult or unexpected questions mainly because
the
online application pretty much too up most of my time. This being
factory work, the whole process was fairly impersonal.
No difficult or unexpected questions
The
phone interview began with a general discussion about the position,
the
company (Amazon), and my background. This was followed with a test
question, asking what would I do if you was in charge of a web-based
e-commerce company selling shoes online. In this hypothetical
scenario,
the marketing dept ran an ad for a few products offering 2-for-1. The
website had slowed to a crawl, but overnight had returned to normal.
What would I do?
No difficult questions.
What is the most important metric to focus on when evaluating a new
business or investment?
Write a program for a parking lot in Java
Be
sure to know complexity analysis for every bit of code you write, and
how to use the STL if youre writing in C++. Know how to use hash
maps/hash tables.
Tell me about a time you failed.
How to find first non-repeating character in an incoming stream of
characters
Nothing out of the ordinary some questions were harder than the
others
Write a function that determines the longest palindrome in a given
string.
There is a flow question. It isnt difficult, but they want you to
demonstrate an ability to balance labor.
How would you troubleshoot a customers network problem?
How would you reprice amazon prime if your goal was to greatly
increase profitability
can think of any. all related to the position.
Find the longest repeated substring in a given string.
The
interviews were very technically oriented thankfully. There were no
behavioral questions besides the usual: Why do you want to work
with
Amazon?I was given only one problem in every interview, which
surprisingly takes the greater part of the interview to solve. We
communicated using CollabEdit.com.Question Number 1://Write a
method which takes an array input and returns true if the sum of any
two elements is equal to the sum of the corresponding indices.//
Concretely if for an array the sum of values at any two indices i and j is
equal to the sum of i and j.Question Number 2:// Write a method to
reverse a linked list.// State any assumptions and write any
classes/structs that you will need.
Implement a method that flattens an iterator of iterators.
What would be a disadvantage to using recursion in this case?
I
really didnt get any questions that were hard to answerI am very
experience in customer service and all of the questions were related to
that.
The
most difficult question was going over the ads and identifying which
products/services that Amazon would promote. While I spent time
going
over ads before my interview, I didnt really feel prepared to identify
which products would/would not be accepted.
Length of a circular linked list
Tell me about a project that you failed
Nothing special, all basic and expected questions.
Nothing difficult
How would you forecast demand and price a service which is new and
does not have any history.
1)
What would you think would happen if Amazon decreased 5% in the
price
of all its products. 2) Tell us of a time that detail played an
important role in smth s (2)
Linked list
Questions were pretty much your expected computer
science/algorithms until the last one, the bar raiser interview.
Write a function to tell whether a BST is balanced
Implement quicksort.
What do you think is the next project that Amazon should pursue?
One
of the Recruiters, went through a role play of a SLA and after that
part was done I was asked to write the most complex boolean search
string I could come up with based on the SLA. I threw together a site
search with wildcards and a tilde to indicate grammatical variations.
It
was a very easy process. No real interview you talked with a person
that discussed your schedule and work assignment preference.
Most of the questions are easy.
Tell me about a time you used data.
How to work with difficult employees who are not productive at all
Nothing actually, I answered both of the questions, but still I didnt
make it to the second round.
Asked about Itos formula as stochastic calculus is on the resume,
although its totally unrelated to the job.
One
of your vendors typically sells you a widget for $100, but is offering a
discount of $80/widget when you buy 500 all at once. Would you
accept
the deal and what would be the process behind your decision?
Describe a time when you have failed as part of a team.
Arranging file system in the form of a binary tree.
Honoring
the NDA. If you want to be prepared, take a look at your old
programming assignments. (Data structures, algorithms) can you do it
from scratch? Most of it complete under an hour? What if they change
it
to another variant? Can you recognize it?
Design a fridge for the blind
Design question to find the most frequent sequence of web page views
from a log file of all the web pages viewed
Deep
copy of a list list containing a pointer to the next node and also a
pointer to a random other node ( could be a node ahead in the list, the
node itself, somewhere behind or NULL)
Standard
behavioral questions. The algebra in the work-flow problems might slip
some people up but I thought they were both pretty straightforward
I
was not expecting a case interview in the first round, so was caught
somewhat off-guard when asked a case question. Other than that, the
questions were quite predictable, such as Tell me about a time when
you
had to influence a group, etc.
Find
the largest rectangle area on a bar graph. Example, if you had a graph
of 1,4,5,3,3,5 the answer would be 15 (35) which is formed by the
rectangle that is 3 high and spans from position 2 (1 based) to 6.
System design questions: The focus was on the design of the data
stores and scaling the systems.
find the start of a loop in linked list
Nothing hard. Write a function to merge two presorted lists, explain its
time complexity.
I
cannot remember any questions verbatim, but conventional wisdom I
heard
beforehand was true. Provide detailed answers. They want to get
beyond
the generalities of a resume, so the more concrete you can be, the
better
The questions was common. Seems they only have 5 questions of
database.Each
time a person can meet 3 of them. But the time is 1.5 hours. I think I
didnt write more on the analysis. Didnt move forward s (2)
The
bar raiser asked me a question that had nothing to do with the job I
was interviewing for. It was an analytical question with no background
provided.
The
questions were expected for this role, although the hiring manager
seemed to expect I would know exactly what metrics Amazon used,
despite
Amazon being extremely secretive about anything Kindle related.
How do you describe your management style?
I was a bit rusty on my c++, and Im sure I got all the problems
correct, but Im sure it was the comments that killed me
None of the questions were exceptionally hard, just make sure to have
very specific answers.
Most questions were standard. Behavioral and case. How would you
estimate the number of prime users?
Find if a binary tree is a mirror image s (2)
How
do you test the functionality of weather.com which takes a coordinates
anywhere on earth and gives you accurate current weather
information.
After I given my plan which is to use automation tool collecting
weather
information from public weather station and compare results. I was
asked what if theres no web service, no phone service, not even radio
and you cant load weather forecast information from the public
weather
stations. Nor you can use historical value to test since the results
need to be very accurate. s (2)
Design a object oriented class for a vending machine.
Be ready to speak to your volume, and how your measure your
success and the success of the different pipelines you source from.
Ask to reverse a linked list, both recursively and iterating way. s (3)
A lot of technique questions, as well as programming and algorithm
skills. And you need to prepare some brain teaser questions.
basic
programing questions like given an array of integers write a function
that returns boolean when sum of two number is equal to given
number
Tell me about a time when you took a big risk at work.
No strange Amazon type questions that you tend to read about.
Behavior based interview.
graphs and trees
Question related to representing aspects of a chess game, data
structures needed and code to solve a chess problem.
Most questions you can find from online
asked for stories to show customer focus
Nothing
unusual or unexpected. Basic technical questions about linked lists,
binary search trees, circular arrays, OO design. Pretty casual process
actually.
A
large case study question in which I was asked how, as a manager I
would react to a certain unethical activity. As I responded, the
situation was changed around in different ways and was then asked to
explain how my behavior would change. Not extremely difficult, but
definitely requires being able to understand the rules of a company
and
how a manager should properly treat his or her employees
Reverse a linked list both iterative and recursive way. s (2)
You need to be able to explain your solution really quick as you dont
spend a lot of time with the Amazon person.
What are your weaknesses
There wasnt too difficult question.
They
have basic project management questions and also ask you to define
the
logic to solve a problem (that can be solved programatically). For
example, how many buses are needed for a particular bus depot given
a
specific schedule.
Nothing not easy
What are the criteria you would follow to open a retail store?
For the math questions, they dont care if you get the answer right,
they just want to see how you work through it.
Nothing was really difficult. I would say know your resume in and out.
About the details, and interviewer will communicate with you when
you are typing. s (3)
Find all valid English language words in a give matrix by traversing
horizontally, vertically or diagonally
Case questions did not expect case questions for Ops.
Questions regarding task managers and some specific computer
questions.
wont be difficult u should be good in recursions
Everything was really easy.
A lot of the questions had something to do with sorting algorithms, or
some modified version of it.
Fast powOf
Efficient way to find a loop in a linked list.
Business Case: very little time to crunch a lot of data in order to
determine a pricing strategy for products.
Signed
the NDA. In relation to the book: Cracking the Coding Interview,
Amazon
will ask about scalability, and your code must be as efficient as
possible.
All questions are regular algorithm and OOD questions.
What is your favorite principle/value?
I
havent interviewed in a while, but all the questions seemed to be
pretty standard fare. Go to the whiteboard and write an algorithm
that
accomplishes thus and such, with the caveat that it perform in no
worse
than linear time.They were largely interested in how the problems
were tackled and what types of solutions were produced.
It was a very challenging group assignment, few behavioural
questions.
How to design a zoo with OOP?
How to fetch telephone number and email address and copy it in
another file
Binary search on a sorted array that was rotated once s (2)
no questions, though background checks take longer for some than for
others.
Tell me about a time when. That is almost how all the questions
started.
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.
Why do you want this position?
How do you explain NPV to a non-finance person?
Be
careful how you reply to why you are looking for another job, why you
are not happy with your current or previous position. The HR
interviewer
will ask this question and how you answer it could kill you.
If
you were for example the web server admin for google and you
received
an upset call from your client complaining that he and his friend
receive error failures when attempting to connect to google.com, how
would you attempt to troubleshoot the problem?
I
did not meet any difficult or unexpected questions. The interviewer
evaluated more on ones communication skills and thinking process.
On campus interview. Two 45-minutes interviews.
The
three data structure questions are: 1. the difference between linked
list and array; 2. the difference between stack and queue; 3. describe
hash table.
Hash tables, string manipulation, big o complexity, other general
coding questions.
I
had answered that you should make sure your entire team believes in
your organizations principles. She asked me how will make sure that
this happens.
Explain a situation when you have had to deal with a angry customer,
how did you approach it?
Questions regarding double hash tables
Business
questions 1) Amazon has decided to launch add a new Nike watch to
its
portfolio. How would you market it? 2) Amazon is deciding whether to
launch a book subscription service (whether online or delivered
books).
What factors will you consider when looking how to price it and how to
market it?
How to deal with hash collisions?
It
was difficult to sit there for an hour and a half. It was also
difficult to get in touch with anyone in the HR office (a problem I
found for amzn workers as well as perspective workers)
Design an ads auction service. There was very little input on
requirements or level of detail they wanted.
I dont know how to write the second code.
In
all of these phone screens, for the most part, they seem to want you to
have done a project that is EXACTLY like what their department is
doing
(as if they cant relate what you have done with what you can do in the
future). One interviewer keeps coming back to a work example which I
told her I didnt have, but her persistence told me she had troubles
checking the boxes on her sheet.
In
a scenario where a customer delivery was wrong, one being out of
stock
the other being wrong item delivered, take me through the stpes to
correct the situation
All the questions were behavioraltell me about a time when.
Math flow problem took some time to figure out exactly what I was
solving for. But once you get it its pretty easy.
Nothin too unexpectedbut the long day makes for better chances of
breaking you down by the end. Dont lose focus.
Endless behavioral questions.What is the most difficult situation you
have ever faced and how did you handle it?What was the toughest
challenge you have ever faced?Give an example of a time when you
showed initiative.How to Introduce Process Improvements
Successfully?Sourcing strategies?
What is the angle between hour hand and minute hand in an analog
clock?
not difficult. very general. Expecting an immediate hire, and I am still
in school. Will definitely apply again.
Nothing
too crazy, really. Just know straightforward algorithm/coding
techniques, and be prepared to work in pen/paper in a language youre
comfortable with. They were understanding about not knowing the
exact
methods for language API calls, etc.
All
of them were tough; this is not a casual process for the super passive
job seeker; you need to be prepared to speak to metrics, projects,
specifics. Dont be intimidated; stay calm and really talk comfortably
about your accomplishments and successes. Yet, dont be
overconfident.
Be able to be vocally self critical when appropriate.
In the first interview, he ask a question about how to get the height of
a tree. Easy one.The second is to find the maximum path in a tree. A
path are the links between any two nodes in a tree.In the second
interview, he ask factorial, and big number multiplication. And a OO
question.
N/A, all very typical behavioral questions
I think the interview problems are about regular topics. There are not
unexpected questions.
Walk me through how kindle books would be priced.
Write
a function that takes two strings and returns whether they are
permutation. There are two ways to do it and you have to be able to
answer all of them and say the time complexity for it. Then write the
actual code.
Questions
included: array where indexes correspond to the tree node number of
a
parent node, and values correspond to current tree node number., root
having number -1 Write code to recreate a tree (binary tree, bnon-
BST).
Another question was: given an array of numbers including negative,
print the highest sum of the continuous sequence you can find.
Another
one: difference between hashtable and hashmap, etc. Detailed
performance
test questions: load, stress, etc tests. Given than these definitions
differ from company to company (I attest, as my parent heads
performance
engineering in large US defense company and this was discussed over
and
over)why write down and question every detail from you response
and
pick on coefficients such as 1.5 versus 2, etc: this is quite
nonsensical. s (2)
Given any binary tree, write an method to test whether it is a Binary
Search Tree
It was 3 programming questions, they were easy and available on
careercup website and the time was 1.5 hours.
You
are in charge of a video game vendor, and are contemplating reducing
the price from $40 to $30. They are currently selling 1000 units a
week.
Please give your quantitative reasoning on the impact of the price
reduction on unit sales and total revenue and profits, with specific
numbers. Also walk us through how you would decide whether to
implement
the price change or not.
One moderate question that appear on Coding Interview book.
There wasnt any difficult question.
If you make sure to internalize Amazons core values, the interview is
easy.
I
was given a detailed description of the job I was applying for and
asked what my first steps would be, once I got the position.
What was your worst mistake ever?
Be prepared for the math flow question
Phone
Screen 1 Leap frog problem. Youre given a array, each element
represents how many steps you can move forward or backward. If the
element is +k you can move fwd k steps or if the value -k you can
move
backward k steps. You need to check whether you can navigate from 0
index to last index in the array.Find least common ancestor in BST
treePhone 2:Given a BST find a num greater than a given numPrivate a
tree level by levelOnsite:1st round: Write code to receive bytes of data
which are sent in chunks for bytes arrays.Function(Bytes[] data, Object
state) {//fill the code here;}Object
state is something you need to decide. But what ever you put in that
will be returned back something similar to static data.The first
4 bytes represents header which has the message size followed by
message or data. The message can be in the same chunk or next
chunk or
chunk after. Same is with header. I was given like 30 mins to write
code.Example: 0005123 45So in the above bytes since
first 4 bytes are 0005, it means there will 5 bytes of message in the
same chunk or diff chunk. Same goes with the header.2nd round:Map
of child to parent chars are given. Design a tree using that data. Root
node will be a dummy node which will be given to you.s2-v1s1-v1s3-
v2a1-s1a3-s1a4-s1v1-0a4-s2v2-0s8-0dummy node is 0.3rd
round:How
you prevent dead locks and asked me the code the graph based
deadlock
code prevention (Psuedo code) when a process already know what
locks it
going to access.Boogle question. Find all words formed in Boggle. Also
he gave function which says whether a string a valid string or not.4th
round:How
do you design a storage for data center. What will you do if youve
multiple storages. He kind of discouraged consistency and rather was
adamant on simplicity and fast throughput. He is into this merge all
storages as one continuous block or arrays and some how build a
lookup.5th round:Deign a video recorder to record videos on cable.a
Channel can have multiple shows. Each shows can be shown in
different channels at the same time.Each show can have multiple
episodes. Each episode can be run at different or same time across diff
channels or same channels.You need display what and all shows are
shown at one particular time, all channels and all shows.Record: given
a time and channel. Record all shows in that timeRecord:
Given a show and a channel. Record all episodes. What will you do if
the channel timings change after you received the record input. s (2)
Questions
are focused on what you have done and achieved, not on theoretical
behavior. Be ready with examples and more examples, and lots of
data.
How would you represent a graph with million nodes ?
The questions were unexpected and difficult in how poorly they were
developed.Give me an example of when you were challenged (with
no follow up questions based on what I answered).
-If you are amazon and Samsung offers you 10,000 Samsung galaxy 3
in discount Are you going to take that deal?
The
interview with the hiring manager was tough. Every example was
broken
down to the nitty gritty. The manager apologized beforehand and said
that he would interrupt me, not to be rude, but to delve deeper into
what I was saying. By nitty gritty I mean, actual excel functions I
would perform to get to a certain point in the analysis. This was the
difficult part because I realized that if my example was not rich or
detailed enough, I would not have anything to say if the manager
delved
deeper beyond a point.
Find maximum depth of a tree.
Do you know who is our CEO? How do you pronounce his name?
What
would you do if somehow you shortshipped 10,000 units of something?
What would you do for the customer, how much would it cost the
company,
and how would you prevent it?
Cannot
provide the exact question (NDA) but it was related to a product
strategy for their ongoing product implementation in the international
market
All were expected from the standard view point. Nothing difficult as
such.
mini url design. How to store it to database
Technical
questions were all as expected, I had to write code to perform certain
operations like find the nth fibonacci number, the largest product of
any three numbers in a list, etc. After writing each solution I was
asked to analyze the time complexity and improve my solution.
Pretty simple and basic
In addition to the code, you have to describe the algorithm and data
structures.
basic computer science fundementals
What is your favorite research method? What is a website/app that you
like or hate and why?
mas
most surprised by questions on how I would design a financial software
architecture to resolve a specific issue cant give more details for
confidentiality reasons.
Giving a string with number from 1-250 in random order, but miss 1
number. How to find the missed number. s (2)
No real difficult questions standard behavioral interview tactics as
well as situation based, tell me about a time you
What was your most innovating idea at your present job?
In
my third interview, I was asked how I would handle a loosely outlined
hypothetical scenario in the prospective position (which had not
previously existed at Amazon). I inferred that a similar scenario in the
past had caused this particular interviewer some personal or
professional frustration.
The most difficult question: describe what Human Resources means to
me
How do you detect for the first repeated character in a string? How do
you detect whether or not a word is a palindrome?
tell me a time you took a project from beginning to end and what
customer changes you made along the way.
The
most difficult technical question was to devise an algorithm for
traversing a 2D grid with obstacles in some specific manner that I
cant
quite remember anymore.
It was about the Standby configuration
A graph cut problem, as I was not familiar with this area (mostly EE
background)
Code merge sort
How can you design a highly scalable system to fulfill given
requirements . ?
1. On a shared notepad, i was asked to write a program that performs
multiplication of two byte array.2.
Write an algorithm to trace all the websites and urls present in an
html file and visit each of them to get the same list.. until you reach
dead-end.
All the questions were very very easy
For the second 45 minutes phone interview, the interviewer asked a
question about memory chunk.
Signed the NDA. Sorry guys, no questions disclosed.
If
we are making X amount of revenue on 60 units of product and the
profit
is X what would the new price point have to be in order to make Y
revenue.
Tell me about yourself
After your boss told us how great you were, what would be the one
reason they would tell us NOT to hire you.
Business case study
find all the list of words from a letter matrix
They asked a theoretical about what I would do if 500 servers were
failing. That is not an experience that I have had.
The interview was very misleading.
Behavior question
Give me multiple examples of when you have used data to make
marketing decisions?
Write a function to determine if a tree is a BST.
What would you do if your coworker/friend were being dishonest
(stealing)?
The questions were mostly on Data Structures and Algorithms. The
interviewers also asked questions about my projects.
What *specifically* have you done at past jobs related to the job
description.
there were a few
Giving previous examples of works completed and computer payroll
systems used is a plus
How do you determine page load times of all pages across
amazon.com?
1. given a room of people, one of which is sick, after a while, how to
know who infect a person2. level traversal of a binary tree
Develope a chess game
Be prepared to write short C program involving recursion.
Describe
a situation where you had the most difficulty advocating for specific
language to be put into a contractual agreement during a negotiation
exercise. What was the issue? What did you do? What was the
outcome?
What are the 4 principles of OOP
If you see someone doing something wrong, would you report them to
your supervisor or anonymously?
How would you tell a customer what Wi-Fi is?
Can not remember, all tech problems. Not very hard
There
was not a really difficult question. The first question was based on
design classes. And the second one was on checking whether a binary
tree
is a binary search tree. One question per round. I screwed up the
second question.. so did not get the offer.
how to implement big data framework like hadoop
If I give you an array of N integers, find the largest three numbers
which will result in the largest product. s (2)
What has changed in the last six years since Amazon last reviewed
your resume?
Simple
linked list implementation problems, questions on data structures
(hash-maps, etc.), asked to code binary search tree solution to a
problem (i cant quite remember the question exactly)
Heres
a situational question: Say you have a deal in front of you to possibly
be renewed that made $50k last time (thats a lot of money for a deal)
but the return rate is at 6% and we want to keep it to 5%. Would you
keep it or not?
Never
expected the management to be so ugly for a retail company do not
feel like buying anything from them anymore. Even when you sell an
item,
Amazon always side with the buyer. Lets wait and see where this
company will go to!
Nothing special actually
If you were to choose where our next fulfillment center would be what
would you choose and why.
given a pool(P) of co-ordinates (infinitely large), find the closest N to a
given user co-ordinate
Nothing unexpected. Fairly difficult questions.
Are you on drugs?
Behavioral
based questions were easy to prepare for. Amazon prefers the STAR
(situation, task, action, result) method to answer. Would suggestion
preparing for the math flow question. I was asked the following: You
have 30 associates who all work an 8 hour day, 5 days a week. 2 need
to
be in indirect (non-volume producing) roles. Your direct (production)
rate is 150 units per hour, but you have two 15-minute breaks during
the
day. How many units can your department produce in a 40 hour week?
s (5)
How to forecast the output of a warehouse for Christmas? s (2)
nothing
difficult or outside of the job description. mainly going over your
resume followed by behavioral questions related to that.
Remote Assessment Test was very difficult
SQL
questions were moderate. General reporting sqls. Both of them asked
me
programming questions involving arrays. I answered all pretty
well.There
was a data modelling question which i had problem understanding. He
gave me few co-ordinates and asked me how to represent them in a
database / data model.
When and how have you applied analytical processes to improve work
conditions?
All questions are behavioral questions with the typical STAR answers
expected.
A complex tree question which involved implementation as queue and
Linklist both
How you handle difficult customers?
I
can not talk about my interviews on site. My over the phone technical
interviews were focused on front end development. Asked about HTML
standards and behavioral issues between browsers, implement an
accordion
component from scratch, javascript scoping problems, etc.
Talk about how to add and remove item to an linked list in some
position
Why Amazon?Name a time when you worked on a team.What would
you do if you caught an employee stealing?What does customer
service mean to you?Why should Amazon hire you?
X==NULL and NULL==x, what is the difference
Panel
interviews that deep dive into root cause. You can never provide
enough
details or data at Amazon. If you are the type of person that fluffs
answers, you will fall on your face.
Nothing
How to implement a java garbage collection
I thought the amazon interview bar has gone down drastically. For an
SDE 2 position, you expect more than CS 101 questions.
Generate an email based on really limited information.
production floor math problem
No difficult questions as such, but testing basic programming skills
You occasionally get asked things like How would you explain the
internet to George Washington?.
something related to computer architecture
How would you get associates who are not up to productivity
expectancy up to rate without any form of disciplinary action?
Most
questions are behavioral. Visit Amazon FC careers website and read
the
leadership principles. If you have problems tailoring your stories to
these principles, maybe youre not a good fit for Amazon.
What practical steps have you taken to elicit maximum contributions
from each member of your team?
Was
asked to design a system (from user interface to underlying
components
and classes) to accommodate a specific customer service business
scenario.
Be
prepared to cite work experiences where you were an owner, leader,
when
you applied customer focus and when and how you have been
innovative as
a designer.
Word ladder
The most difficult part is about how to select a data structure to solve
the problem effectively.
If you were the CFO what 3 documents would you look at daily and
why.
Nothing
unsual, standard interview questions anyone would ask to see if you fit
the company job needs. Your experience handling a difficult situation
in the workplace, and and how did you handle a demanding job
requirement.
What was the most difficult employee situation as a manager did I
have to deal with.
At Amazon we hire the best of the best. What makes you the best
of the best
Cant
go into detail because of the NDA. But basically 1 OO/design problem.
2
silly puzzle-solving algorithms. Both involved traversing matrices.
None
of them were difficult or unexpected. Getting your point across to the
screener is tricky unless you use all the right buzzwords that Amazon
has (14 principles). The screener seemed to be very focused on a
small
area of the product and had a hard time calibrating experiences
outside
their area
nothing unexpected
What your most proudest invention?You have to write an essay. That is
the culture. Everything is written in long form.
Nothing difficult.
use tree data structure to compute a proper expression which includes
value, operator and parentheses.
The design exercise was to build an in-store kiosk experience.
consistency related question on AWS
They
were all very similar and not unexpected if you do research there
wasnt anything completely off the wall. One interviewer was rather
distracted I dont know if she wasnt enthusiastic about me or just too
busy to interview but her interview was very hard her questions
werent
pre planned at all but she didnt seem to know what to pick.
No unexpected questions
Tell us what you bring with you to the company and why Amazon
should hire you.
Heres 10 million dollars, what will you go build?
explain Big N notation. I am not a programmer or CS major
Questions
were about previous experience as well has hashmaps. How to
implement
them, handling duplicate keys. There was a coding question about
linked
list that I cant remember exactly.
1st is to check whether a linkedlist has cycles, the other one is to get
the most frequent integers in an array
All
I can say about the on-site interview was that we were in the room for
about 6 hours, with 6 rounds of interviews after the initial HR meeting.

It
was not difficult. The result wast unexpected that despite my better
performance in the second round of interview, I was not selected for
another round
Nothing
difficult or unexpected, I just did not have answers to all of their
tell me a time when questions, because in some instances there was
no
time when I am a career financial analyst, I do not have managerial
experience. If I had a managerial background I would be writing a
review
about how well I did and how I got a job offer. Be honest with
yourself, they miss a lot in the phone screenings. s (2)
What are the top risks on your current project?
Design an application for borrowing and sharing stuff.
Easy peasy, lemon squeasy
if a linked list is a loop, kth nearest points, sort two sorted linked list
into one
Design
an algorithm to take a list of strings as well as a single input
string, and return the indices of the list which are anagrams of the
input string, disregarding special characters.Given a binary
tree which is a sum tree, write an algorithm to determine whether the
tree is a valid sum tree or not. Then, write an algorithm that will fix
the tree to make it a sum tree. Then, write an algorithm which will fix a
tree to make it a sum tree by only using addition.
They
did spent a lot of time probing which do you like to do better,
programming or management. My last position was as an individual
contributor although I had a lot of experience with technical
management
before that.
Write a function that prints out a binary tree in order.
This
was an unexpected question for me (also the last interview at the end
of a very long day): What products do you feel missed the mark?
Know how to calculate UPH (Units Per Hour) and the process flow of
warehouses.
Be
confident and comfortable throughout interview process. Take
water,snacks if needed. Math flow problems are not difficult, but with
intensity of interview process, it can affect your thinking and
performance. Stay relaxed and focus on solving problem. Think loudly.
This can help interviewer understand how you think.
Have you ever told your boss that a change was needed?
Most questions were common sense situation questions. s (3)
Nothing difficult or unexpected just basic interview questions.Tell me a
time you dealt with an angry customer.Are you comfortable working
under stress?Tell me about a time you had to work with an unpleasant
coworker.
how could you make success from previous experience? (cant
remember clearly, similar to this one)
Tell me what a critical section is used for in C++. s (2)
How would you break the monotony?
HR
Question: If one of your workers comes up to you and complains that
someone gave her a weird look in the morning, what do you do?
What
was your worst project? The interviewer asked much further about the
project I was talking about. I thought my answer is very bad.
Design and Implement a data structure which supports push() pop()
and min() in a constant time
have you ever worked with a dishonest employee?
Given
an integer N and an array of unsorted integers A find all pairs of
numbers within A which add up to N. (This is the only question I can
remember and I had trouble thinking of an answer at the time) s (3)
What do you consider good design?
How
did you handle a dishonest employee or co-worker? I believe the
answer
is simpleI would report any dishonesty to my manager.
I
expected higher level questions for a senior position. I was not
expecting all of the questions to be about foundational data structures
and algorithms (which I was a bit rusty on). s (2)
Explain when a process you designed failed. What happened? What
did you learn?
As an advice, look up the where do you see yourself in 5 years type
of questions.
go through resume, why MBA why amazon, why you make your career
change,
Why do you want to work here?
Work
flow question giving you details on production needed to be done and
asking you how to best staff 15 employees to finish three different jobs
if each of the different jobs has different requirements as far as
people needed and time it takes to complete.
Was
given a writing sample to edit or rewrite. I had been in the industry
for 20+ years and this was the first editing test Id been given.
I dont remember the question specifically, but it involved
memoization.
Know data structures and alogos well, and OOP prinicples. Explain
every step of the way what you are doing and why.
Nothing unexpected. For example, one question is to explain the
project you listed on the resume.
What happens at layer 2 when you plug a laptop into the net work?
s (2)
the
hash table question was determine was which person bought the same
thing on the same day. the data has to be taken from two files from
two
days.
How do you remove red nodes and get the entire tree structure in a
red black tree
Be
clear what kind of product manager you want to be, product
development,
partnership/relationship management, or just managing the product.
Read
well the job description to identify what they are looking for
Tell
me about a time you were in a meeting and had an opinion different
from
everyone else in the room. What did you do and what were the
outcomes?
All technical questions.SQL and statistics knowledge questions.
Coding Breadth First Search(I had yet to learn Breadth First Search in
school).
All
situational questions. Look at leadership principles. Find stories for
each. Make sure you are very well versed in your strengths AND
weaknesses. s using STAR (so practice a lot otherwise you
will ramble without realizing it).
How can design a TinyURL for a website? Design an algorithm and
write sample code which generates TinyURL for a website. s (2)
If the sales in market place suddenly dropped significantly, what would
you think is the problem?
Limited time to sale yourself.
On
last phone interview, they asked whether I have ever disagreed with
my
boss and how I handled it. That particular day I was very mad
working
as a VP of Dev in a startup and we had a non-performing Sales VP
And I
thought he should have been fired (he was let go subsequently) and
had
that discussion in the morning with my COO/boss and it was fresh in
my
mind. So I inadvertently told the Amazon guy what I thought should
happen.
Finding out if a linkedlist has a loop or not. Mergin two sorted
linkedlists. s (2)
asked what kind of conflict resolution did i have to preform at my last
job
All
questions were read off a screen, and all answers were typed
frantically while I spoke. Questions were all right out of Interviewing
101: Tell me about a difficult client, How do you deal with
ambiguity, etc. You will not be listened to, only transcribed.
I
have several different routes I can use to commute to and from work
each day. Say I hired you to recommend me the best route. Walk me
through the thought process of how you would determine which was
the
best route.
Describe a time when youve implemented a change for your
supervisor.
Can you work in a building that exceeds 90 degrees or more for 10
hours?
He
seemed to dislike the interview process so there really werent any
difficult prepared questions, it was more of an informal conversation
where he went over my resume and asked me things that a Producer
would
normally know (and I did)
The questions were very usual for that kind of interviews.
Will you be able to speed up your rate?
How
would you recommend we approach the following scenario?: A vendor
wants
to require Amazon to obtain consent from the vendor each time the
vendors trade name is to be used.
Given
a sorted array find the minimum amount of values that are needed to
be
inserted to make a sequence of a given length. ie [0, 2, 5, 7, 11] for
length 5
Was
only asked one question. Given a Single Linked List print its values in
reverse order. I provided some solutions but interviewer was looking
for use of recursion.
There
wasnt an unexpected question, per se. but the abruptness of it was
jarring and threw me off of my game a little. I was expecting a
completely different format.
general interview question none related to work being performed
in the end of the interview he asked if I have any question:I asked
what is the responsibilities and duties for this position: he answered I
dont know. I am not in this groupthen I asked what kind of model you
are usinghe answered I cannot share this kind of information (he just
could say for example statistical models).
Code an algorithm to find the longest palindrome in a string.
Math question
Just treat everyone with respect!
N/A. It turns out im not interested in development position so i told
the recruiter to cancel the test.
It
was pretty much alright nothing out of ordinary and every question
was
sticking to the job description so if you go through that job
description you will be good
tell me about team failure
Questions on final interview came across very high level but manager
was looking for more in-depth Real World answers.
Asked me why I wanted this job.
Tell me about a time when you could not solve a customers problem
analysis of a certain algorithm
they asked me a question on a subject that i had not had the chance
to learn before
It included basic questions mainly about JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.
This
is probably repeated many times throughout the site, but know your
algorithms and make sure you really know the programming
languages that
you have on your resume. Be prepared and best of luck to you.
They did include a small math section, to be done in a limited amount
of time.
Biggest mistake at your current job.
Lots of questions about analytics.
No a hard question but understand the flow process for a warehouse
Qs involved string manipulations, OO design, algorithms and data
structures.
How do you check if the 5th bit is a 1 in a binary number
Nothing really extraordinary.
There was only one question. How to compress a string? If
AAABBAAA the resultant string should be 3A2B3A. s (5)
I was asked in the last 2 years what is a decision that Ive made that I
regret.
The best implementation for a binary tree.
Given a set A of 20 distinct positive integers, find two subsets that
have the same sum. For example, if A = {10, 20, 30, 40, , 200}, then
{10, 20, 30, 40, 100} and {90, 110} are two subsets that have the
same sum (which is 200).If there exists such a pair of subset, print out
the numbers, otherwise print out none.If there are multiple such
sets, you only need find and print out one pair.
Describe
the most important decision you have taken in managing someone
that
still makes you feel good. Also describe the worst decision you have
taken and how soon did you know that you made a mistake in
judgment.
Large
group programming projectworking on a small development team and
brushing up on datastructures would be helpful for preparation
Nothing,
Interviewer was not qualified enough. Started asking stupid questions
and argued about few sure short answers. And Technical interviewer
started asking about salary expectations !!!
Describe a conflict you had with partners and how you resolved.
Are you able to work for more then ten hours in one day on a regular
basis.
Nothing
was difficult or unexpected. The recruiter did tell me not to reuse
any of my examples/stories for any of the questions, which threw me a
bit.
General questions about distribution and operations, which were
outside of my engineering background
Write up a modeling problem
Devise
an eval() method for numerical expressions such as + x /
given a string containing brackets and parenthesis. I.E. (3 * 6) +
[(2/4) 1]
Given
a stream of characters and a set of characters, find the shortest
sequence in the stream containing all characters in the set.
Writing search strings on a board.
Probability questions I had not seen since graduating
There
werent any difficult questions. Most started out with Tell me a
time and I had prepared possible answers ahead of time to help me
jog my memory.
There were a few mind games being played like- when meeting with
the site director, there was no place to sit.
How do you analyze cost in the project during your internship?
Most
questions are similar as in the book CTCI expect the last algorithm
problem. The problem itself seemed to be an open question, but I
guess
the abilities such as making reasonable assumption and the thinking
process are important.
explain
what | how to implement web service which has good performance
and HA
(high availability) and how to improve service performance etc. it
seems
little bit vague or high level question for me and i asked back what
kind of detail level he want.
I
kept being asked questions about hosting/infrastructure. I am not
clueless here, but asked the employee interviewing me if this is a
position where you would manage developers. The answer is yes, but
still
the questions are about hosting, F5When I talked about
development, the interviewer did not follow. I asked at a time if he has
development experience. Asked me why I dont just use cookies for
whatever it was. Hello, dont you know that cookies get echoed with
every HTTP request from the browser? More network resources, less
performanceJust frustrating to be interviewed by someone that
does not even know that when you make a request, the browser first
looks into its cache, the if-modified-since calls and so on. He said
that is not what happens Then he hinted at the fact that he wanted
to
get my understanding of DNS. Gave him the info on hosts file, local
DNS, public DNS but lost him at hosts file and policies that can control
what you can override in the hosts file.Asked me to code
getting the nth fibonacci number. I did it using iteration. I guess he
wanted a recursive solution which is well suited for tree traversals. In
many other cases it puts a crap load full of stuff on the stack Let
me stop here..
Cannot
discuss the project due to confidentiality. It shouldnt be too hard
for someone who has a few years of coding experience.
Be prepared to discuss the DMAIC process regarding your experience.
Vertically and horizontally center an element on the screen using css.
s (4)
Tell me about situation where you directly impacted customer
satisfaction
Why Amazon, design an algorithm to rearrange numbers in a
sequency, time complexity of the algorithm
nothing really, not sure what they wanted, but the questions were
normal.
without
being too specific, because of NDA, the engineering questions were
the
type of questions that only someone with a CCIE would most likely be
able to answer
How would you test performance of your code?
How can passwords be passed from client to server in a secure way?
s (3)
Detailed
questions regarding quirks about certain data structures. What
happens
in certain insertion, deletion, collision scenarios for particular data
structures. Know your data structures.
The case presentation had really tough Q&A
When have you had to deal with a difficult interaction with an
associate and how did you handle that situation?
Design code to be able to be able to find a song, a band, and all songs
related to a particular band.
No
technical questions asked just a request for why you applied, what can
you bring to the role and a self assessment of your skills
Questions about hashing in Java, and I hadnt re-studied that in a year
in school.
The best way to prepare is to go to topcoder and practice a bunch of
the questions there.They
asked a question about infrastructure. They had me describe my
companies infrastructure, and then grilled me on how to adapt it to
AWS.
Make sure you have at least some knowledge of all of AWSs systems.
Strength and weakness
Simplest
way to make the same change to thousands of html files stored in a
Unix
environment. Should have been able to answer it but dint.
I
pretty much expected all of the questions because I researched ahead
of
time.Just be positive and enthusiastic and you should be fine.
one
interviewer at onsite was a bit rude and kept assuming that all
organizations work like Amazon and was not able to understand why I
did
what i did in teh financial sector. I did not push too hard back at him;
however, if i were to repeat, i would have told him that his vision is
limited.
If
X product had excess inventory, what would your strategy by to sell
through the inventory if the company selling the product couldnt offer
any promotional funding? And other typical scenarios similar to this.
I am unable to give details, due to a non-disclosure agreement.
there were none. questions were all pretty traditionally in line with an
interview
What are your three biggest weaknesses, and how did you turn them
into advantages in your most recent position.
NULL
Bit shifting in C. It is way simple but didnt refresh before inteview
Nothing was too difficult. Bit-shifting, data structures, efficiency.
Tell
me about a time that you pushed back on a decision that was made.
That
question was fine but they probed my answer about 10 times. I didnt
budge
How would you design the game Monopoly?
Algorithm to solve vehicle routing problem
no difficult questions
I
dont remember there being a question that I would call difficult or
unexpected. They all seemed to be reasonable under the
circumstances.
None. In fact compared to other interviews this one was extremely laid
back.
Graph question
Why amazon?
Google
what they did, what they are doing, and what they plan to do, and
think
about if there is any research topics related to those. It would help a
lot.By the way, even if you are doing optimization,
logistics/transportation/supply chain type of research, still, get some
ideas about machine learning, data mining, analytics-type of stuff, it
would help.
I had to find the length of a binary tree
Question surrounding a very specific launch of a product.
How weird are you on a scale from 1-10?
How to design an efficient parking system for a parking garage
Software
architecture questions (when there were no right answers) and the
interviewer struggled to prove his answer was the right one.
Time is limited, must program & debug within 30 mins/ question
The
initial coding test was by far the most difficultinvolved finding n
highest ranked films in a network of similar films. Pretty unbounded.
I
was expecting Front End Engineering questions based on HTML, CSS,
Javascript/jQuery and I was asked what is the best way to search and
find the best possible way to reach a node.
The
technical questions werent that hard, but they asked a lot of
questions like name a time when you strongly disagreed with
someone in
your past. How did you resolve it? Those questions are harder to
prepare for.
There are questions from strategy, market sizing, pricing and some
technical questions around the position you are interviewing.
None
There
is a flow problem that you have to present. The person will throw kinks
and you have to adjust on the fly. It is very helpful to have some
operations experience.
Math case study
Hardest
Q was: Heres a binary tree: find the longest path within it. So, find a
path between any two leaf nodes, where the path is the longest.
design a public library system
The design problem
Every
temp candidate is given a simple test to fill out, which tests the
candidates ability to perform simple job tasks. It also asks if you
have had any experience with a hand scanner.
Describe
a time when changes were made at management level that you had to
adapt
to? Never had a job before so It was a fairly hard question to relate
to school, etc.
Writing a file system
I
dont think the questions would have been difficult, there was just a
language barrier over a speaker phone. From what I could make out of
the
last question, it was how would you deal with a project that was
delayed for 4 months you had a month to complete it, you also have 3
other projects that were due at the same time, you were under staffed
and could only get 1 additional developer. As I explained how I would
approach it, he would keep adding complexity (i.e one of them is a
high
value customer).
reverse a string in one place.
Drilling down into experiences. Know everything on your resume in
great detail.
What was your biggest failure?
What would you do to improve Amazon.com and the overall customer
experience?
Design a system to bookkeeping hotel reservation.
Design a file system
Given
a big tree of geneology and a grandfather and a grandson print all the
nodes at the level of the grandson from the grandfather
nodeSomethong like level order traversal.
Na
Not many but they really need to keep their wrong and egoistical
attitude in check
Why Sales? Why AmazonLocal? 3 times I was asked both.
There isnt anything that is unexpected or hard.
java questions. I was told any scripting experience would suffice. but
everyone wanted to hear java.
All the questions were very basic.
write a function that prints out the strings in a binary tree and then
recreate the binary tree from the string.
How to design a test to compare the effectiveness of two commercials.

Compute the nth prime.

there was a question on deliverables if you had to chose 1 out of 3
which would you choose and why?
Phone Interviews:1) Least Common Ancestor of 2 nodes in a binary
tree2) Trim extra spaces in a given String.3) Check whether given
linked list is circular or not4) Design a restaurant reservation
systemFace to Face:1)
System Design question . Implement File java class. He went deep in
to the design specifics , asked me to design cache , handle parallel
access , efficient data structures to do it etc..,2) Integers
are arriving at a rate of one on a socket stream. At any given time
print k largest numbers. Describe an efficient algorithm and implement
it in language of your choice.3) Given a binary tree and an
integer S , print all distinct paths from root to leaves which sum to S.
Describe the algorithm and implement it.4)Write a program to
print the largest sub string which is a palindrome in a given string. He
asked me to optimize it with O(n) solution5) Given a list of
nodes , Node class has fields value(of type integer) , next(of type
Node) , other(of type Node) where next points to next node and other
points to some arbitrary node in the list. Make a copy of the list.
Describe an efficient algorithm and implement it.
How do you think Amazon Prime contributes to the bottom line of the
business?
The most unexpected question was the paired-programming question.
I am still unclear about what I was supposed to do.
I
was asked to define SOLID, While I had heard of the acronym, I had
understood its use in the context of technical conversation, but didnt
know the individual parts.
Where do I see myself 5-10 years from now?
Nothing that wasnt posted on this website already.
Nothing
was too difficult. Bit-shifting, data structures, efficiency. Finding
phone numbers of a given format inside large number of different
HTML
files.
How would you test this system?
Given an analog clock how would you tell the angle.
Are you having trouble hearing me?
Write implementation of a data structure online
Big O notation questions, and some trick programming questions
Have 2 phone interviews involving coding onlineQuestions about data
structure, BST. finding duplicatesit is really difficult especially you need
to hold your cell-phone and code at the same time..Recruiter and
interviewers are niceinterviewers will give some hints on how to solve
it.at the end of the interview, they will ask if you have questions to ask
them.
brainstorming questions are total waste of time
Biggest weakness.
print a tree in level order.
hash map, division of number with + and only, data structures
Case
question: What would you do if a product that you were in charge of
had
a pricing mistake? For example, you were in charge of Nikon camera
that
normally retails for $500, but it was listed on the site for $50 by
accident and 500 people purchased it.
Explain Collaborative Caching?
If you were is X situation, what would you do and why.
Explain the process from start to finish of what happens when you type
in a web address and press Enter.
One
interviewer asked me about my resume, well a specific bullet on my
resume. Other than that there were no real hard questions.
Tell me the reason I should not hire you
1. Find out if the given binary tree is symmetric
Jeff Bezos gives you $10M to start a business unit; what would you do?

All very straightforward. Simple dictionary tree, hash table, finding

prime numbers.
Asked about my projects and professional experience, then 3
questions (in both the interviews)1. Design a Contact List2. Mode of a
given list3.Given a binary tree. Find if there exists a path from root to
leaf which sums up to a given number.
Explain about a process improvement technique that you have
improvised over your workplace in detail.
Program to find the longest common subsequence (in a sequence)
We have a table named Employee with columns employee_id,
employee_name, manager_id, manager_nameThe table contains the
following rows:employee_id employee_name manager_id
manager_name1 Bob 2 Alice2 Alice 3 JimWrite a SQL query to find
Bobs managers manager. s (2)
No questions caught me off guard, standard questions.
Writing
the code for a game that entailed an array of numbers and finding the
fastest way to get to the end when the numbers were the number of
steps
you could move forward, and if you hit a zero, the game was over.
what is your most difficult decision
Find substring in string.give complexity for time
None, exactly what youd expect..answered all questions well still no
offer. I must be missing something..
In previous word did you solve problem in unconventional way and
solved ambiguity problem before.
On
the whiteboard, design a high-availability system that can take in the
periodic table of elements and then output the largest word that can
be
formed with the elements. Once that was done, describe and design
different ways to optimize the system.
it was typical questsions on algoritims. Im able to choose any
language I want.
Why did you like least about your previous job and why?
What do you think about the offering of discount on gift wrap?
What would you to improve the function of my current position?
Write a program to find all possible pairs in array that sum up to X.
With efficiency O(n).What is shared pointer? How will you say a tree is
binary tree?Linked list has a loop?
How is six sigma relevant, what does it mean, calculate dpm.
1. build a queue using 2 stacks2. find the first repeated number/string
in an array3. 2-sum4. given an array of strings, find all the anagrams
The
data analysis parts are interesting: one is about predicting sales
given historical data; one is about the effect of weather on sales.
There
are always entities (vendors/authors/publishers) that dont want to do
business with Amazon. What data would you use to help convince the
entity to do business with us?
Tell me about a time you made a mistake, what you did to fix it, and
what you learned from it.
complex data structure problem
Drawing
the system architecture on the whiteboard of a very vague scenario. I
know it is expected to see how you approach a problem and what
questions
you ask, but it seemed the scenarios lacked detail in some cases, not
all.
Suppose
that Amazon was to build a robot and offer it online through
Amazon.com. How would you decide which features to include in it?
None were difficultI thought the entire process was easy. Theyre not
looking for true leaders, theyre looking for managers.
General algorithm & datastructures questions nothing detailed.
Most of them were direct
5 hours of behavioral questions. No one prepped me for these typed of
interviews.
Questions about computing the distance between words
Reverse the order (left to right) of all nodes in a binary tree.
Why do you want to leave your current position?
Tell me about a time that you were challanged in a project and what
did you do?
asked to write the programs on sorting
Some question about OOD, why you have these classes.
I didnt expect the HR to ask one programming problem
All related to data structures
How would you create an array given two sorted arrays.
Nothing
was unexpected. Was very impressed with the process. Most difficult is
every person I interviewed with had less than 10 months with the
company.
Tell me a situation that your got challenged in public.
after
a site tour what are we doing wrong? asked to give constructive
criticism to site leader and site safety manager on what we could be
doing differently from a safety point of view and how I would
implement
those changes/improvement.
they
will drill down on mini cases, kept asking questions until you ran out
of ideas. they asked me what products i bought on Amazon, then said
how
will you persuade the CEO of Estee Lauder to sell their products on our
website?(i said i bought cosmetics)
How would you decide whether to launch in a new market?
Pretty descent questions.
There were no unexpected question.
all questions are basic cs knowledge
How would you implement a song recommendation system
Describe your analytical skills.
One question was about how to find empty parking lot space in a
parking lot.
Questions made sense for a developer senior position.
Describe how you will construct cdn
What kind of script language youll use to delete all SSN in a large
amount of files in distributed system? How to delete them?
Give me an example of how you utilized analytic skills to solve a
difficult problem.Tell me about a time when you had difficulty working
with a team member. What did you do to resolve it and what was the
result?
give a situation where it took asking why five times to get to the root
cause
Unexpected what do you think of the company website and what
would you change
The
first question is from google i think. They ask you to write an
algorithm in order to figure out a kind of bottle will broken after
being throwing from a certain floor. The second part was about basic
algorithm but the lady had a strange accent and I have to keep asking
her what she said. The second part was easy.
code online with a link offered by amazon, I am a little bit worried!
This
big supplier has tried selling some of their products through our
store, but have not seen the numbers theyd like. How would you
convince
them that they should continue investing in the cost to port their
software to our app store?
Basic data structure questions and array related questions
Not really
Have you ever had a disagreement with a superior? How did you
resolve it?
Given a list of students ID, marks and date, find the average of top 5
marks for each student.
Write an algorithm to find out if two words are anagrams of each other.

Give a data structure which can push, pop, find-min in O(1) time.OO
Design about a chat server
Finding phone numbers of a given format inside large number of
different HTML files
print
the matrix in spiral format (inside out). Not that difficult, but
challenging if you have not heard of the question before (as was the
case with me)
Calculate the distance between two hands on a clock.
How to find the k closest data points to the origin given n data points.
behavior questions like how do you deal with deadlines, how do you
make decision without many information available
iterator of a binary tree.
Why
do you choose to shift from business to computer science when you
were
applying college? (I mean, no technical question becomes more
difficult
than this one.)
topological sort, solving postfix expression
Very general questions surrounding algorithms and data structures.
Optimization in both the programming questions.
much datail asked about resume, get prepared before you go
There is no unexcepted question
Recreate the StringBuilder class in C++ from the ground up.
The problem was hard to solve, very ambiguous.
Final
question of the full day, with top senior manager: Something outside of
my field (production/supply-chain-oriented) having to do with the best
choice between 2 supply sources for a single product. There appeared
(not surprisingly) to be no correct answer, and although I remained
calm
and continued to evaluate and explain my reasoning, I clearly failed
it.
How would you design a latest viewed item list type function for
Amazon.
Nothing so difficult actually.
Design the service similar to bit.ly
Nothing
was too difficult, just usual data structure/Algorithms and fundamental
CS stuff. I have written no disclosure agreement so cant disclose
anything here. But every one looking forward to work there must
emphasis
on recursion and Tree structure.
what makes a good hash function?
Design a File System using OOPS concepts.
1. Trie. Given a string stream, and a Map, which has Strings as keys
and Action as values.When Strings in map were found, the mapping
action would be fired. One character each time.
Asked
general computer science topics (Describe a hash table, etc.) Didnt
ask any behavioral questions, or anything about my rsum. Had two
coding questions:1) Given a Binary Search Tree, print out the
median value. If there is an even number of nodes, print the average
of
the two middles.2) Given a Genealogy Tree, print out the tree, row by
row.For example: Dave /\ Michael
Sarah / \ / \ Joe Alex Sam TomOutput would be:DaveMichael
SarahJoe Alex Sam TomThe
questions werent very hard, but I nearly ran out of time because I
couldnt understand them. I spent a lot of time just trying to
understand what they were asking for. They asked about the time and
space complexities of everything I was doing. After I finished the
second question, he gave me another problem with it. Asked if there
would be a way where you get stuck in an infinite loop, and how to fix
it.Also, they allowed me to choose which language I was more
comfortable with. I used Java.
Something related to arrays.
None
How to troubleshoot when you fail to sign in your online
chat/messenger program.
Nothing really, all pretty standard computer science questions. Study
other reviews on here and you should be fine.
Was
confused abit about TREE SYMMETRIC question. He was expecting a
recursive solution. But explained him a solution using tree
inorder/preorder/postorder traversals. Explained him, and wrote code
for
different traversals and some functions to integrate all.Finally he
seems convincing with my approach and solution.
Find the minimum and maximum values of an array of integer arrays.
They ask everything about data structure.Binary tree and linked list
Find the intersection of two arrays.
I
didnt get asked anything out of the ordinary at all. They have their
list of behavioural questions and each team member had a different
way
of asking the question or drilling down after answering. No trick
questions, brain-teasers, or what is your favourite animal types of
questions whatsoever.
which collection is best suited in this case? explain why?
What should you do if someone on your team is not finishing all of
their work?
Implement a class that simulates a 2-D Array using only a 1-D Array as
its instance variable
Given a red and black tree,traverse a tree from bottom to up and
remove red nodes preserving structure of tree
Binary Tree level order traversal.In-order traversal a BST tree that each
node points to its parent and all leaves link to each other(SLL).Find the
last k fibonacci numbers that are smaller than n.
All the questions were easy. Basic networking questions.
Given a text file, perform a pre-processing step to create a DS; so later
when queried for a word, the lookup is very fast.
Behavioral questions like how will you explain internet to a small child
I interviewed for Manager position. They asked very deep technical
questions.
Questions
werent difficult, but you need to be very specific in your responses.
Interviewer wasnt particularly interested in leadership philosophy as
much as how exactly it was applied.
None
of the questions were that difficult, just common sense type questions

the type you would expect from Amazon. They all had to do with
actual
technical and management problems that they had encountered in the
business.
Balance binary tree, how hashmap works in java
Explain what you would do if a customer wont stop hounding you to
help him, and hes on the phone
I was asked by one of the interviewers if I thought he did a good job
based on the numerous questions I asked him.
Tell me about a situation where you failed and how you learned from it.

It
was a specific sorting question about sorting certain chunks in an
array. I had to write it out and then the efficiency of the program was
asked as well.
get fully prepared for data structure and bit manipulation.
Standard interview questions nothing really unexpected.
none
I got a question on recursion, i had to find a path in a maze of n*n
matrix.
Describe a project where you had the greatest impact and how did you
use data to drive your decision making process.
1. Test whether linked list is cyclist or not.2. Print k closest points to
origin out of n points in a XY coordinate system.3. I dont exactly
remember the third one, but it was related to arrays.
How
to convert a string to integer (expect to write a method for it) ?
without using parseInt valueat stringtokenizer split (that what I
suggested to use but they were all prohibited)
A
set of jobs are given, each has a start and end time. Assign threads in
parallel for the jobs to be completed at the time mentioned. Optimize
the number of threads allocated.
Honestly,
no unexpected or super difficult question. Just be confident and think
about the problem thoroughly. Also, speak out while you are thinking.
I
found answering questions a time when you disagreed with everyone
and
turned out to be right or time you were dead wrong to be
challenging
questions if you dont have examples like that. Just be prepared with
lots of stories that showcase your brilliance.
Tell where I am having success finding Mobile Dev candidates
Nothing difficult very routine, very generic and boring questions.
array intersection
One
question was to write a function to determine whether a word was a
palindrome or not and the other was a basic permutation problem.
Most questions were focused around CS topics, algorithms and data
structures.
Nothing
unexpected, review the math process problems from here which you
can
find through search and expect the above adjustment or a similar
adjustment.After you have made your calculations I suggest
highlighting the priority and understanding how you would shift your
labor to ensure this is met.
Mostly behavioral and situational type questions, as well as past
experience
all from cracking the coding interview. Not hard.
Reverse a string in double linked list.write the test case to compare the
products on amazon.com site.
One of the questions is to determine whether a linkedlist has loop
Basic behavioral questions. Why Amazon?
Detect a loop in a linked list.Otherwise, the other questions were all
map related.
Find the largest depth of a binary tree.
How do you deal with ambiguity
Write OOP system to parse different type of error formats. s (2)
Create an algorithm to find the length of a binary tree.
A time when you used a lot of data in a short period of time.
The questions were quite straightforward. Nothing exceptional.
Business
case was a work situation where tasks needed to completed (given
constraints) and what steps you would take to get it done. i.e. move
workers to different areas, allocate different resources, etc.
Was a simple OO programming question involving hashtables.
Just one question:Make a function to determine if the the tree is
symmetric or not.Various
questions asked in between while I was making the code and logic.
Language to write was at preference. I chose C. 45 minute interview.
Pretty Intense.
How are ArrayLists implemented internally?
All
questions were decent, not too simple but not overtly tough either.
However, key is talking though the entire process even during phone
interviews while working on a problem.
difference between abstract class and interface
All I answered had to be coded.
All the questions are technical, nothing surprise. But their questions
are not easy
Shuffle of cards
Two questions, neither very hard:1.
Create a flood method for an image class (similar to the paint bucket
in Microsoft Paint), taking in x and y coordinates and a color to fill
with.2. Create a function to input integers (1-999999) and output
strings (one nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine
hundred-ninety-nine).
What was a Computer Science class that youve taken that has helped
you the most?
What is your favorite day of the week?
Questions
are pretty standard success/failure type questions, resume walk, tell
me about a time with occasional cases thrown in.
Ask about how to improve the speed of my first solutions of the
searching algorithms
Questions about distributed software systems that i was not familiar
with
Not a lot of curve balls so honestly no single question stood out.
Nothing in specific.
Implement a data structure like a stack but with a way to find a max at
O(1) time. s (2)
solve longest palindrome in O(n)
How would you create a price for Amazon Prime
Compare two dates.
find the intersection between to lists.
Mostly situational questions, but cant go specific since Id like to
respect the NDA.
Unable to release information per agreement you sign when applying.
Be ready for the unexpected.
What would you do if a vendor asked you to remove a negative review
on their website? Would you remove it?
Find the fifth largest number in an arrayFind the intersection of two
arraysAlso know some stuff about Java like visibility of methods
If a tree possess same tree node.
Pretty
easy questions. Seems like they were straight from Program Interviews
Exposed, and basic data structure & OOP questions.
How do you decide whether to use a box or an envelope to ship a
pen?-What do you see yourself doing in 5 to 10 years?
How would you improve the website?
1. Find the second biggest number in an array of int.2. implement a
stack using an array.3. Everything you do they will ask whats the
complexity and ask if you can do it in a better way.
No
technical questions, only questions phrased as tell me about a time
when you had a difficult decision to make, had a positive experience
with etc etc
Fairly straightforward questions on algorithms and DS
The
most difficult question I had was finding the intersection of two
arrays. Seriously. The rest were even easier. Im not kidding.
Third
interview asked me to talk about binary trees, designing a class
hierarchy, running time of certain algorithms, usual technical stuff.
Nothing extremely hard, just state your assumptions, talk through your
thought process, and dont be afraid to say give me a second to kind
of
think this through in my head. They really cant expect you to create
the best algorithm, all things considered, in a matter of seconds!I was
surprised that there werent any behavioral questions (e.g. Tell me
about a time in which you had to ..).
In
the first call i was asked about one coding question on matrices and
about basic questions on Data structures.In the second had a coding
on
string mannipulation and questions related to object oriented
programming
the one in the first round
find max in an array.UNEXPECTED. not difficult
Nothing unexpected.
Data orientated.
Give me a time when you got push back from a manager/client and
how you handled it.
No. Everything is simple and normal.
system scalability: how would do to make a mobile app to go national
Given an 2D array of 1s and 0s, find the number of islands of 1s
Nothing
too difficult if youve done your homeworkyou may be given a
hypothetical product and asked to create a merchandising plan for it
off
the cuff, or you may be given a rapid-fire merch math quiz.
Set
up a class structure for an elevator system in a large building. It may
have multiple elevators, shafts, groups of elevators, buttons, ways to
call an elevator, etc (hint, the elevator system they have in their
office is apparently very inefficient)
Given two nodes in a large relationship graph like Facebook, find the
shortest path from one to another.
We have text file qwith student names and their scores. One student
has atleast 5 scores. File format is:name1 score1name2 score2name1
score3name1 score4name 3 score5and so on.Find the average of top 5
scores of each student.
Difference between linked list and dynamic array.
It
wasnt one question, but 3 of the recruiters questions covered very
similar negative / failure area and being asked to tell a different
story than last time
Given
a spase matrix, create a class that would:1. have a method to take the
sparse matrix and put into a more efficient data structure. 2. retreive
data from the data structure. 3. Use a data structure that would
produce
an iterator that keeps track of the order in which the entries were
added.I was given a class for the data type (xi, xj, value).
In
an array in which elements appear multiple times, it is guaranteed
that
all elements except one will appear an even number of times. Find the
element that appears an odd number of times.
Questions about how subtypes work. I wasnt expecting that, and was
pretty rusty on them.
Made a deep copy function for the following class:public class Node
{ public String data; public List chain;}By
deep copy he meant that each node in the chain needs to be a fresh
copy, not the original nodes. That way modifying the original node will
not change the copy in any way.
I
had to implement a data structure for a last Least Recent Delete Cache
and write relevant functions (it was a class for me since I used Java).
Some functions included puts(Key key, Value value) and get(Key key).
When I was stuck they helped me out.
It was hard to answer behavioral / situation questions. I am very bad at
selling myself. It is probably good to practice these:Describe a simple
but great idea that you have successfully implemented.Describe what
you would improve in your current team.Describe the biggest
challenge that you faced in your work.Describe the situation when
your team could not make a deadline and how you handled it.
given two nodes and a tree, find the lowest common ancestor
Explain why you are no longer with your former employer
How would you optimize the implementation that you provided from
O(n2)?
What should Amazon do to enter the offline small business market
(mom & pop retailers, not necessarily online)
The collision issue of hashtable
There
were some questions based on graph theory that were very simply
stated,
but required a very well-thought-out precise solution.
Hash-table implementation
Design of traffic system was little difficult. The interviewer kept finding
faults with my ideas.
Design a data structure that has constant time pop, push, and
constant minimum value of data currently in structure.
There was nothing new. It was all the same stuff. Tell me about
yourself, etc.
write dynamic programming for recursion
Nothing unexpected.
to find a missing integer between 1 to n
1 find the least common ancestor of two nodes in a binary tree(not
binary search tree)2 design an Amazon like online booking system
find all possible paths between two points in a matrix
1st interview: Implement the algorithm for playing minesweeper.2nd
interview: Implement a^n in log(n) time both recursively and
iteratively
Both
of the questions are not difficult but I didnt figure out the latter,
so you should write down the code instead of just the pseudo-code. s
(2)
Simple questions and answers
Given a number, write code to count how many 1s are there in its
binary form
directly write a program or function to solve a problem (bugs frww)
Zipcode Validator
no very unexpected questions
Nothing was really that difficult. With basic algos and DS knowledge it
is doable
Nothing particularly difficult. Know your CS fundamentals and youll be
fine.
None But they expect a good coding and data structure questions
What would you say to someone who complains about advertising on
Amazon.com?
Find the longest path that exists between any two nodes inside a
binary tree given only the root of that binary tree.
Tricky
Questions on Algorithm. One question was asked on merging two
linked
lists with given order of 3rd link list. Other question asked by
different interviewer was somewhat similar with different logic.
If you were to change one thing about Amazon, what would it be?
The interviewer went deep into stack concepts.
Nothing was unexpected
Why do you want to work for Amazon?
Search Tree
OOP based questions
some of their project names was unfamiliar
Implement a generic Hash Table. Discuss the various implementations
of a hash Table and then choose the best one and implement.
2nd largest number in an array s (3)
all questions posted in ths thread
how would you get to the 1st chapter of an ebook through ur code.
It was a question involving min/max heaps.
Implement a program to find whether a number is even or odd without
using arithemetic operator s (2)
No tough questions at these early stages.
Write a program to print all permutations of a string.
My experience. I hardly got any.
Interview 1: Data Structure Questions like BST, Hash
tables,Complexities,Vectors.Which languages was I comfortable
working in?Merging two sorted lists together. Find the first letter in
input string which only occurs once.Interview 2:Find all the pairs of
numbers that sum to a number x.
3) Given a N*N array where N is even such as 4, 8 and so on . Print the
array from the center.a= [1 2 3 4 5678 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16]the output should be [6 10 12 7 3 2 1 5 9 13 14 15 16 12 8 4 ] .
s (3)
N/A (unable to discuss the problem we were tasked with solving).
The excel exercise was specially tough for me. It is NOT related to
finance.
Just been asked two questionsthe first one is to write a sudo code for
an binary heap to print out the 17th, 18th and 19th nodes value.the
second one is to write codes to print out the maximum and the second
maximum value in an array (not sorted). In order to reach the fastest,
the interviwer gave me a hint to separate the situation with small
array
and large array..
1)Design a hotel reservation system in detailed manner.2)Design a
sales dstrib system for amazon
Find out if two words are Anagram or not.
Is this the right role?
How do you find out if our singly linked list has an infinite loop in it?
The general thought process about making decisions that might
impact your teams project.
linux command question, how to find a different type of phone number
in a file using just one linux command, totally forget s (2)
How would you sort a Red Black tree?
Print
the nth number in the fibonacci sequence. This question was easy, but
due to my nervousness I completely blew it. As a result I was not
offered a job.
They asked a long question about string manipulation, requiring most
of the interview time.
There were three code on paper questions (algorithms and data
structures) and one system design question.
Ask me how to implement hash table in JAVA
second one
explain concept to someone who is not a computer scientist
If
the estate of ______ (a famous childrens books author) didnt want to
allow an ebook because they felt it diminished the artwork, especially
in the kindle, how would you alliviate their concerns?
1st Interview:Question:
Tell me about your current project (focus on Project Management Stuff,
Agile/Waterfall, explain the project at higher level still cover key
information related to project management ex. for agile scrum talk abt
u
got the project and how executed it, include agile scrum keywords,
search on youtube on agile scrum and u will get lot of videos)Q:What
-if scenarios, project is being delayed, developer is not as
productiveread Project Management books and u will get all
thesebasically stick to script dont elaborate much but cover key
stuffwhat they are looking for in Project Management side interviews
is you have worked in that kind of environment and your
communication
has to be crisp dont go back and forth.Q: What type of challenge u
get most i.e..scope change/ schedule change or budget changeQ: how
u exert pressure if things r not working ans: thru reports and escalate
higher up in the chainQ:
wud u go for a deveoper who delivers poor quality or go with
developer
who delivers good quality but delays ans: go with one who delivers
good quality and 1) take into account his/her behavioral pattern during
planning 2) exert pressure to get things doneQ: read some project
management book for sure to get idea on what is keyQ: read on risk
management as u need to cover it as part of what u have
doneInterview
2: Technical, what i learned for interviewer is ALL program manager
positions at AMAZON require SDE-1 level of knowledgewhat it means
that interviewer should be able to represent developer community
correctly at various meetings.Q1) find substring from a string2)
build an elevator show analytical bend of mind, ask lot of clarifying
questions, dont forget to start with requirements, he took a level up
and asked to create classes for elevator system3) build restaurant
reservation system: dont talk abt coding but show lot of analytical
skills, asked me to create a data model but before that i walked thru
user scenarios and understood detailed rquirement, ask lot of
clarifying
questions4) capacity related, again lot of analytical and think on
your feet type questions also understand from interviewer and answer
as u
go alongI think i got rejected mainly because interviewers initial
perception that i may not be as technical as they would likeas my
project management interview went really well5) he also asked some
pming questions on what-if analysis, who is accountable if
project/program not delivered, obviously PM is the one throat to choke
and he agreedGood experience
They
provide a math question, and since the math question appears on
Glassdoor and other places they will modify it after you answer it the
first time and ask you to provide a new answer
Basic questions about OOP, data structures and algorithms.
How would you serialize a binary search tree?
Just
to describe the data structure and algorithms you use for the program.
And analyze them using big O. And asked if you have more time, what
other algorithms you may use.
Nothing was difficult. Just make sure you study their top 9 company
values.
Design amazons other customers who bought this also bought that
featureHow would you define your SLA..(I thought that would be
customer and resource driven but that wasnt good enough)
As
far as I could tell, all questions were out of programming interviews
exposed. I suspect that they give the book to the interviewer and tell
them to use those questions. However, dont just memorize the right
answer. If you very quickly come upon the best solution, theyll have
you come up with 1-2 more.
I
think the most difficult question is about the behavioral part. Amazon
is a really fast paced company, so they wanna their candidate to meet
this criteria,
You
are in charge of inbound at a warehouse (everything from the time a
truck gets to your lot to when inventory is stowed). You need to
increase productivity by 30%. Walk me through how youll do it.
know your hashmaps
Given an entire repository of files, how would you find the files which
contain a certain 10 digit telephone number.Also, give a tool/library
method to do the same as well as some OS commands
find the longest repeated substring in a string.(e.g., banana ->
ana; I am what I am -> I am).
None. They were all easy. Standard algorithm and coding questions.
Typing
the code in notepad for the second interview, since I had not coded C+
+
in a while. I would recommend reviewing typing code.
In what order would you complete these three tasks
I was asked two questions.Q
1. You are given two version numbers of a software, like Version 10.3.4
and Version 10.3.41. Write a program to find out which of the version
numbers are the latest. If version 1 is latest output -1, if version
number 2 is latest output +1 else output 0 if same version. Both the
version numbers are taken as string. He also asks to make the
program of
minimum time complexity as we can. At the end he also asked the
difference between an iterative program and one with recurrence and
their advantages and disadvantages.Q 2. Given two files with a
list of application IDs (or some kind of data) stored in them , write a
program to compare the data in the two files and output all the
common
data found in each. What data structure would you use and why ? Give
a
minimum time and space complexity algorithm. Why did you choose
the
particular data Structure or algorithm ? s (4)
difference between an array and a vector.
Design a rental locker system.
you
have a binary tree (contains negative and positive number) find a path
from root to a leaf node that sums to value K (K is given)Design a GPS
system.
None.all questions generally behavioral. s (2)
How are you going to save me $10 Million
How would you price the Kindle Fire. Why?
The questions werent difficult. They were more like basic interview
questions.
The
most difficult question was to find the maximum contiguous
subsequence
in a bar chart. I was able to find a solution in O(N^3) which is
basically the brute force method The idea is that given a bar chart with
peaks and valleys, you should find the subsequence X which gives
you
the maximum area underneath the chart. For the life of me I couldnt
think of the answer at the time, , I had a hard time visualizing it,
however its a classical computer science problem called the
maximum
sum contiguous subsequence problem.
Describe a time when you went outside normal porcedures to get a
project done.
Design
a large web-based, highly scalable, highly available system. This was
an open-ended question. You should make sure to ask the interviewer
lots
of questions to narrow down the problem before jumping into a
solution.
tell me about a time when you disagreed with a teams decision and
what did you do about it.
Tell
me about a situation where you had to solve a particularly difficult
problem. What was the situation, how did you handle it, and what was
the
outcome?
Go through the steps of making a warranty for a product.
How would you implement Amazons users who bought this item also
bought feature? s (3)
How many cows are there in Canada?
how to pick up string with quotation?
Amazon asks interviewees to sign an NDA. Not willing to break it.
There
was nothing especially difficult. Im not allowed to discuss the
specific problems but I will give some general answers. There were a
couple of cute problems, but mainly the problems were related to
searching some space. I had 2 problems that required breadth first
searches. A problem which looked more difficult than it was. This is
probably the hardest type of problem, because it requires that you
think
about it and play with it until you see the simple solution. Think out
loud, this is important.
How would you decide what items to put on sale in the musical
instruments category?
About scaling a web app.
All questions were focused around projects
New
product launched with accidentally discounted price tag. This is a new,
prestigious vendor that you want to retain. Item went live and
practically sold out. You lost tons of money for Amazon and the vendor.
What are your next steps?
Main
question was: If you had an opening (i.e., Web Developer) what is the
first thing you would do? What would your next step be?
What is the difference between an interface and an abstract class?
Give an instance of a financial metric you developed that did or didnt
accomplish the intended goal.
All pairs shortest path problem.
Given a set of integers, produce its power set (the set of all subsets of
the original set)
Right
out of the gate before I even got a chance to sit down at the table, I
was asked to write a function that tests the lengths of a triangle using
legitimate syntax. Ouch.
Amazon is considering offering a subscription book service. What are
your considerations for launching this offering?
Find the nth largest number of an unordered list in time complexity of
O(n)
You
will be asked questions that are impossible for you to answer. The goal
is to see how you approach problem solving. Just be honest
Usually focused on negotiations and relationship management with
internal and external stakeholders
first interview had like 5 or 6 short questions followed by a coding
question which wassum
of 2 numbers within one array adds up to a target number which you
have
as a parameter fairly easy question if you read all the interviews
questions on glassdoor.second phone interview had 2 questionsthe
first one was a find the kth node in a linkedlist and the second was to
check a string for ( and ) and there are only so many combinations
that are considered valid and invalid. Valid is if all the ( have an
ending ) for example , (( )) or ()()Invalid would be )()( or ((()if the
string starts with ) its automatically invalid.second interviewer asked
time complexities on both of the question.
What makes you different, and why should we care?
had this portion of the interview where they concocted a fictional
scenario, presented it as if it was real.
Pick a product you admire and how would you simplify it
Design a buy/sell pricing algorithm for our secondary marketplace in
Product Category X.
Validate the BST
Write and analyze an algorithm to check if there exists two numbers in
an array that sum to a given third number.
To copy a linked list. Every nodes prev points to the previous node, but
the next points an arbitrary node. s (2)
I had a few glitches with equipment they provided. I lost a lot of time.
The interviewers didnt apologize or acknowledge this.
They had many clever questions, none of which can be specifically
shared due to an NDA.
Shortest path problem, which I failed to solve
I was given a case study and was asked create a business report
get the second most highest integer from an array s (7)
How to tell if a tree is symmetric.
What
price per minute would you set for a cloud computing product that
delivers a premium product and is currently set at $1.04 per minute?
There was no unexpected or difficult Question.1. Find the first non
repetitive character in a character stream.2. Check for prime number
and Elevator system design.3. Agent bidding system design4. Find for
subtree within a larger tree. s (3)
As
one author put it, Amazon loves Object-Oriented Questions. It seems
like the interviewers are more concerned with the process and quality
of
code over the number of questions youre able to answer, although Im
sure a good balance of both is useful.
How did you implement X in order to solve problem Y?
design and board game
Given a linked list, find a key value and how many times it occurs.
Include the possibility of a loop.
Its says team project. But remember each member is evaluated
independently.
Object Oriented Design
Usual questions. Nothing very difficult
How do you handle people who take credit for your work
forecasting
techniques such as how to forecast demand of certain product; what
are
the most impressive project you have worked on.
How would you implement auto-complete on the Kindle?Answered that
you first get the use cases: quick searching, better user experience,
research.Keywords
from the given text could be loaded with the book itself or generated
using a scanning process. Put into a datastore in memory cache (quick
access), ignoring basic words such as the, and, or, etc.Each
letter typed in would reduce the result set.Sort the results user a
weighting system, such as number of occurrences, uniqueness, etc.You
would know if your algorithm is working by the number of characters
entered vs. the word chosen and its place in the sorted result set.
What is the most advanced calculation you have ever done in Excel?
The
interviewer asked me to build a tab based interface in html/css/js on
the phone but in the online tool. As an additional follow up question I
was asked to write the JavaScript as a jQuery plugin
Endless behavioral questions
The accent problem.
All our situational type so could be difficult to remember examples.
Mainly questions about array manipulation.
I didnt expect the scalability question was that hard.
Most unexpected question was What will working for Amazon do for
your life?
Code something that uses polymorphism
Dont want to give all the hard questions away, thats what keeps
them hard!
Usual Oracle questions
Which design patterns did you use in your projects and why?
How do you scale up a local business to a national and international
business
Given 8 identical balls and find the heavy one by using a balance with
two weightings.
Unstructured in-person interview, ensure that your thoughts are well
organized, focus on customer
Was
asked to design a large distributed system on the spot, despite not
having relevant experience. But the interviewer did a great job of
setting up the problem and we talked through it and worked out a
solution. I enjoyed it.
something related to virtual function. not most difficult question as
such but i did not know the answer
Nothing too crazy, brush up on data structures and algorithms
knowledge before the interview.
It
was an extended question regarding to binary tree. The tree consists
of
the numbers and the mathematics operations, like +, -, *, /. The root
is the operator and its two children is the numbers. The question is
how
to calculate the result of the whole tree. I suggested to DFS the tree
to reach the bottom. But my interviewer wanted me to use another
way to
solve the problem. I finally use recursion to solve the problem but it
consumed too much time and I even didnt have time to do the second
question.
What
metrics did you implement internally to measure the business in a way
thats not been done before. Why did you do it and how did it help
you?
And what else?When
given a complex, multi-part hypothetical by the bar raiser, I provided a
detailed, thoughtful response that was met three times with and
what else?
Picked
my previous product and asked me how we computed market size.
What they
are looking for is a very analytical bend of mind.
Questions around creative, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
All questions were straightforward and not tricky.
What are your THREE(3) best traitsWhat are your THREE(3) worst
traitsWhat is your leadership styleWhat would your team say about
youVendor
calls you and has 10k of something for $10 per unit. do you buy it?
(very strange and ambiguous. had to ask the interviewer 20 questions
to
get the information you need to actually answer the question)
The
head to tail problem was rather difficult for me first I created a
function to generate all words created by changing one letter of a
word,
then I mentioned doing iterative deepening DFS. Probably should have
gone with A* search, with number of different letters as the
heuristic maybe keep a list of explored words to avoid duplicates.
What bring you here? Why Amazon?
I cannot reveal the details of what the project was.
One of the design questions pretty challenging. Cant give the details.
Many questions are aimed at determining why you want the job.
Some example questions:Define a milestone.Define your approach to
planning.What do you do if you know you will miss a critical milestone?
Tell me about a successful technical project.Describe a failure.
What is the most risky decision you took?
I
only remember three of the technical questions I was asked, in
addition
to the usual general questions about my experience, skills, and work:1.
write code to replace spaces in a string with a * character (dont just
use .replace functions though, hehe)2. given an array with values that
increase, reach some max, then decrease, find the max in less than
O(n) + test cases3.
given a linked list that represents two numbers (e.g., 1234 represented
by 1->2->3->4 and 5678 rep by 5->6->7->8), add the
numbers. singly-linked list s (2)
Given a list of coordinate pairs, write a function that separates related
coordinate pairs into new lists of those values.
How would you go about taking decision on buying a stock lot of
merchandise from a supplier in competitive pricing?
Design
a system for elevators with multiple lobbies and multiple areas of
access (ie one elevator can open at floors 1-5, another from 3-7, etc)
At the end of the interview: Would you like to work here?
all questions involve solve problem, then try to solve it better. they
want to see how you think
Most of the questions were behavioral and I was fairly well-prepared
for those. There were a few case questions sprinkled in.
The
most difficult question was during the first interview, and I had to
explain certain features in an operating system like a five year old.
Really it was just to make sure I could create analogies on the fly as
well as be technical, but not confusing to customers.
I did not find any of the questions difficult or unexpected.
Most of their questions were situational and case based from past
experience.
Why Amazon?
how to integrate 3rd party product reviews into a product detail page
Whether or not amazon should enter the XX market?
Just one problem to solve for the whole day with a group of candidates.

nothing tough, though in roman equivalent question, there are many

rules one should be aware of ..
How to check if/where two link lists merge
If a manager wanted a daily tally of where they are in regards to their
budget, what would you tell them?How would you reconcile two
programs data when looking for a payable?
Greedy algorithm.
Role-playing difficult sourcing challenges.
It
was not the questions that were unexpected. It was the structure of
the
day. Upon arriving, I was greeted and escorted to a conference room
with 8-10 other applicants. We looked around at each other, knowing
who
the competition is. The math Flow Problem may have been unexpected
had
the recruiter who coordinated the process had not briefed me on what
to
expect.One additional item that was unexpected. The offer was
contingent on a drug screen like most offers. However, the drug
screen
is not completed prior to the start date. It was actually conducted on
day one of employment, during orientation week.
I
would say that the questions were of the type that I expected. Just be
prepared to handle questions where all of the information is not
necesearily provded, It happened in all three interviews, the itention
seemed to be to evaluate how you approach a problem and analyze
data.
Did not get to interview phase.
A
vaguest ion that was asked in a very general way, but which the
interviewer clearly had specific answers he was looking for: what are
four components that are included in every specification doc. That
sounded a lot like a thing you would find at Microsoft and similar large
companies where process is more strictly defined. I answered poorly, I
think, perhaps because I havent worked with that kind of spec in a
very
long time, and not on any projects that worked out well. Smaller
orgs/programs/projects (startups and incubators, for example, where
the
outcome is always in flux, as I am accustomed to working with) can
have
poor specs, specs that are centered on marketing, planning documents
that are made up of wireframes and time-based stage gates.In any
case, I choked a bit, and the interview kind of skated around and
became more specific as we went along. I dont think that is
inappropriate, though, because Amazon does value and expect the
ability
to deal with ambiguity. s (3)
How do youset goals and achieve them. Generally behavioral
questions were hard
How would you code up a custom rectangle detector? s (2)
Reverse a doubly linked list given a pointer to the head node.
Interviewers
are challenged to dive deep and ask the same line of questioning in a
different way in order to identify your true strengths.
How would you code up a custom rectangle detector? s (3)
Reverse a linked list. After presenting a solution I was asked to provide
a recursive method.
None
of the questions were difficult. First interview question was about an
array and finding all pair values that add up to a target number.
Second
question was, given an array, find as many permutations as possible in
randomly ordering the array.
I expect them to ask me OO design but they didnt.
when can you start. the job was a 5 hour move from where I was
staying at the time.
Write a function to allocated two dimensional rectangles within a
larger area.
Nothing
much questions are easy. If you are have a computer science
degree,
you probably has done something similar to them. You just need to go
back and prepare fot them. Tree and recursion are the most important
topic
How long would it take to prototype your web-based chat customer
service system?
Did not expect to be asked about Mobile technology. Have not worked
on it. Hence was a surprise.
What is the range of numbers that can be stored using a single byte?
s (2)
Assuming every job paid the same, and skills were not an issue, what
career would you pick?
No questions are out of ordinary.
How would you handle a hostile customer?
Create a card game in Java. Say basic poker rules. Use whatever
classes you see fit.
Write a code to find out if a tree is a binary search tree.
We are giving you $1mm, what will you do
How to start the system config program from the command line.
what is your most significant accomplishment
I was asked to explain relational databases although my job profile had
nothing to do about it!
So many follow up questions. Requested to find optimized solutions.
if the transportation cost doubled in the next three years what you will
do to decrease the total cost.
Given a singly linked list of characters. Determine of they form a
palindrome.
What is the difference between an abstract class and an interface?
Nothing too crazy. Standard data structures / algorithms / design type
questions.
He asked questions on what is OLAP , OLTP , questions on data
warehousing , SQL queries
Design an application over the phone interview.
No
difficult or unexpected question rattled me. However the common
theme
questions from each interview was why do you want to leave the food
and
beverage industry for the logistics industry
A practical question regarding starting a new e-commerce business.
Signed an NDA, so cant talk about it.
There things you do like about Amazon
Most
questions were along the lines of tell me about a time when you
faced a
challenge and over come it or a mistake that youve done or an
analysis that went wrong. also an amazon product that you love and
why
Dynamic Programming Question
Show us your contributions to the open source community ? Please
show us some code samples.
Tell me about a time that you had to make a difficult decision without
having enough information.
What was your least favorite class in college and how did it prepare
you for this job?
There werent any unexpected interview questions, nearly each
interviewer had similar questions and there were no odd questions.
How would you expand the business?
He asked me what I used for a particular statistical analysis on a
project about 8 years prior.
a lot of tree problems
Provide details about LDA and Gibbs Sampling.
What is your current level of experince with Unix operating systems
such as Ubuntu and Redhat?
Tell
me about a time where you clearly had an upset customer but it was
not
your fault or the companies, and how you went about fixing it.
Give me a time when.
Write code to print out each node of a tree in level order and print a
new line whenever a new level is to be printed.
memory management
What are things that could be improved for Amazon?
Given
a set of strings, find the equivalence classes of permuted strings.
This threw me for a loop because its been a while since I have done
string manipulations.
Write
a function to transform one word to another word, changing one letter
at a time, using only valid words (e.g., cat -> dog: cat, hat, hag,
hog, dog).
describe reasons you should be promoted over any other employee,
why do we need you?
Given
two lists containing any kind of objects, build a function that takes
them as input and outputs a list of common/different elements. s (3)
What was the most stressful event of your past employments?
You work in the DVD department. How would you determine what the
sales are going to be this year on Black Friday?
He kept asking me if i could make my algorithm even efficient. I found
difficult to convince
How would you price the product to gain makret penetration?
You
are the manager of an ice cream store. You are having a sale, and you
send out 100 promotional emails about the sale. How do you measure
the
effectiveness of the emails?
The unexpected part was some questions regarding multi variate
calculus which I had not expected.
How would you secure the cloud?
Tell me about a time when you created or invented something
Design a Unix-like file system
None
All technical questions are required to answer online. But the questions
are pretty easy.
Define
how database knowledge was applied to resolve a complex issue. How
different sources of information were used to identify and resolve an
issue.
None
Didnt
get that far, but I have to say this is the third time I have gone
through this process and each time it peters out after the homework. It
is very difficult to understand what they want because in a real life
job, I have never had a problem drafting a contract.
None as such
1) A puzzle to find 3 numbers in an array which summed to 0. s (4)
Why
do you want to work here? The question is simple but the recruitor
told me my answer was too generic the first time. You actually need to
have a good answer for this and not the normal bs.
The
coding questions were all doable, but I only had 90 minutes on them. I
spent 45 mins on the first one, and ran out of time before finishing the
third one. Dont spend too much time thinking I guess, just start
coding.
whats the big failure or mistake you made in your career? what did
you learn?
What is a weakness you have
on data structures
None.
Study the other variations on the math problem (several are posted on
GlassDoor). They will change it after you give your initial answer- they
want to see if you can think on your feet and handle stressors caused
by change. Be calm, think, then respond.
You
are given a string with billions of characters spread across many
geographically separate machines. Devise a distributed algorithm to
find
the first non-repeating character in this large string.
Lots of Data Structures and Algorithms questions as well as OO design
questions. I cant be specific as I have signed an NDA.
A
problem solving question that required a graph traversal solution.
After getting enough hints from the interviewer I immediately
understood
what was expected to produce.
How to check if a tree is a BST
Would you ever recommend a project that had a negative NPV?
Was
an employer ever dishonest with you. I really didnt expect this to be
asked but I stated that yeah I had an employer who was and she
wanted to
know an exact time when this happened. Really caught be off guard so
be
prepared for this one.
One interviewer simply wasnt nice.
I
honestly cant recall a difficult or unexpected question. Very standard
questions like Where is an example where you lead groups of
people?,
When did you fail and how did you learn or overcome it?, How have
you
improved processes or been innovative?
Advanced linux command questions and not being fully prepared to
answer that many technical procedures.
Tell me about a time you attempted to refine a process and failed.
Question
from director: four people need to cross a bridge at night, there
is only one flash light and only one person can walk on the bridge at a
time. How do would you get them all across the bridge? s (3)
The
most difficult and unexpected question was a bunch of What if and
An
example of when kind of behavioral questions. I should have
prepared these, I had not and really was stumped and ended up giving
them real examples and expressed my honest opinions (not a good
idea esp
if you are opinionated like me).
asked to do a presentation
How
should you determine whether or not to drop the price of a kindle
accessory? (note that they had numbers and wanted a specific answer
regarding these, not a general one).
In what country should Apple open up its next flagship store?
What was a mistake you made in your current role and how did you
recover?
All questions were simple and easy to answer.
all
the questions were smart my advice would be to go in after youve
reviewed/thought about the projects you want to discuss in fine detail.

Tell me about your weaknesses.

Given 2 strings find the common words along with the time and space
complexity. How would you optimize the algorithm s (3)
Serialize a binary tree
Tell me about a time where something you planned did not turn out as
you expected.
Concept of the java language
Fibonacci
sequence: pseudocode it. Honestly, pretty easy, but you have to be
prepared with quick answers to this and things like this.
Name a time you resolved a conflict in a group environment.
group coding was givensolve some problem of inventory management

How would you distribute inventory to minimize the number of missed

delivery dates while keeping costs to Amazon low?
How
would you design a customer product review system and make it
scalable
(describe in terms of algorithms and data structures)?
A
company doesnt want to work with Amazon because of their loyalty to
one of your competitors. Youre in an elevator with that companys
CEO,
how do you convince him to work with you in 30 seconds? s (2)
The open question of vehicle routing problem is pretty hard for some
one whose research is not focus on this specific area.
How would I change the website.
Do
a deep copy of a linked list in which each item, in addition to the
normal next pointer has a random pointer to another item in the list.
s (2)
What has been your biggest challenge in life or your field?
Your
bar raiser will ask the brick-wall type of questions. Be prepared to
think these out. Treat these questions like trying to please a difficult
client.
A
question about finding contradictions in statements based on some
obscure rules. I jumped into writing code too quickly and didnt write
out some cases to test for first, and I got burned by it. Its not a
super difficult problem, but I was nervous and just skipped some parts
of it.
There
wasnt anything difficult. The most difficult part was figuring out
what the interviewer wanted to hear based on their facial expressions.

System design questions.

This
was pre-Kindle Fire and the questions were about if Amazon should
compete with the iPad. Reasonable questions, but very kept very
hypothetical. Most of my responses were trying to show the questions
Id
look to answer before making a decision. When I said, for example that
Id want to understand Amazons goals in releasing a new Kindle the
reply was that was up to me. Though I may be in charge of a product,
clearly Amazons entire strategy including content (movies, books,
music, general merchandise) is not up to a single Senior Product
Manager. As much as I love to be given a lot of room to make
decisions,
launching a device is a big decision that should meet business
objectives beyond the scope of a single PM. In my experience, theres
always a bigger context.Im sure she felt my responses were too
wishy washy because I was trying to show how Id go about making
the
decision (if it were mine to make). When I interview people, I want to
know how they think and how they would act. The specifics of the
decisions are somewhat less important. I think I made clear how I
would
go about doing the research, how Id go about trying to make a
decision,
etc. None of it seemed to satisfy her. She seemed to want, this is
what Id do . Mind you, this wasnt something I could have prepared
for
since this device was secret at the time. So it isnt like I could
quote real numbers, etc. All I could do is talk about the process Id
use to come to a conclusion. The outcome would depend on what I
learned
and what the constraints were (objectives set for me, etc.) Even
though I
didnt have numbers to back me up, I did go down the path of, based
on
what I know *now* i can see how X makes the most sense. Even that
wasnt specific enough to impress.That unceremoniously ended that
set of discussions.I
was approached by an Amazon recruiter last week about another
unannounced product. The recruiter was very nice and set up a phone
call
with the hiring manager. It was a slightly better tone, but still the
manager was remarkably monotone. I tried to appreciate that this
must be
how Amazon managers are trained to interview and didnt take it
personally but it is hard to have an enthusiastic demeanor when there
is
virtually no response on the other end from the start, no matter what
you say. The manager also insisted on using a speaker phone during
the
call despite that initially I said it sounded like a very bad
connection. Only toward the end did she pick up the phone so I could
actually hear her well.Without being able to tell me what the
product was, the questions were similar. For an imaginary product,
what would I do Again I said my first step was to understand the
overall goals or suggest them if none existed and get buy in as part of
the concept. Everything from there hinges on that. Without some
agreement on why we are doing something and how it fits the bigger
context it is hard to know where to take the device. Features,
priorities, etc. are all driven from what we hope to achieve. Look at
the Kindle strategy itself vs say, Apple. Apple is selling the hardware
essentially pure and simple. Amazon almost gives away Kindle to
make
sales of movies, music, and books. I said if that was the strategy here
too, then I would do X.Now people who know me know that Im
anything but wishy washy. While I can change my mind in light of new
information or persuasionIm very decisive. But it rarely makes sense
to make decisions without any information and describing the
information
Id get before making a decision seemed like an unacceptable
response.I
had a mixed feeling about the interview, but I was able to tell from
LinkedIn that the manager had checked my profile. I read hers and
then
followed her on twitter and I think she followed be back. I thought this
may be a good sign. Sure enough they arranged another round of
phone
interviews. Good! The next interview went very similarly. Same
monotone,
same unenthusiastic responses. Same hypothetical questions.I
should add that none of the of the hypotheticals were aided. For
example, If I asked a question, there was nothing like, assume X and
go
from there.I understand the idea they are shooting for, but
the combination of asking about hypothetical products without
participating in a meaningful way.Anyway, the whole thing is kind of
disappointing as i think highly of Amazon as a customer and I could
contribute a great deal.
Nothing
put of the blue. Program inputs a number gives you the written form.
example 22 to twenty two. simple questions like this
Amazon.com,
in an effort to illegally find out how old I was, after having
successfully passing a nonpaid phone interview, asked if I had
children.
Absolutely illegal in this country. Breaking the law.
I
strugged with the math question due to the way that the details were
provided and didnt expect them to want me to provide the math on a
white board.
There were lots of math questions that I was supposed to solve orally!

A
number of questions that seemed related to the work of other
departments. Not being an employee of the company, it was difficult
to
accurately answer, not to mention why such questions were being
asked.
What are the things that need to be improve in the Kindle?
How would you balance the requirements between the user goals and
business goals?
answered what i did not like about my previous employer.. I did not
want to sound negative. So i had to be polite.
What would you do if am employee was leaving an assembly line
because he was bored?
Not one of the question was difficult thanks to glassdoor i was
prepared
I
was asked what motivates you? I gave a couple answers and each
time I
was asked with, but why? I dont think they were looking for a right
answer, maybe just trying to test you
When did you disagree with your boss? What did you do? What was
the result?
Theyre all of average difficulty
how you would analyze a particular decision or situation, what
financial model you would build to answer the question posed
before going to a tech interview know how to code Trees, Linked lists,
Stacks and Queues.
none. it was quite easy but they expected something better from my
answers
Youre asked to start a new division under the parent company of
Amazon; What do you do and why?
Name
a time and decision in your career where you had no analytical data or
ability for observation where you made a development decision that
was
in opposition with upper management and you were right.
No
real off-the-wall questions. Maybe an overload of behavioral questions
like Tell me a time you went against your own personal standards to
get
something done or When did you receive unfair feedback on your
performance and what did you do about it?
How did you handle a confrontation at work.
java fundaments
How would you improve user experience on a section of the website?
Was
asked open ended question on efficient traffic flow through an
intersection. This was really an OO design question, but it was open
ended enough that it was easy to go in many different directions.
What would you do if you didnt agree with managements decision?
General questions about troubleshooting tactics.
How
would you fire an under performing employee. Why are you asking me
this
when HR is a great reference for any type of employee issue
How do you deal with under-performers?
When
asked if I thought people steal and I responded with a yes answer,
she wanted to know WHY I had not reported it. I answered because I
had
no proof but she wanted to make sure I WOULD report it in future,
even
if just speculation.
None
were difficult, just be prepared to come up with 4 separate situations
for such questions as discuss a time when you had to handle a
difficult
situation, discuss a time when you had to fire a non/underperforming
employee etc. They do not want the same answers and they type
your
responses in and compare them at the end of your interview.
One
of the interviewers asked me to implement a file system. What was in
particular frustrating is that he left is so open ended as to the level
of detail required, yet expected a specific answer and was unhappy
that I
took a different approach.
why should we hire you?
This
was followed by couple of emails to a local senior recruiter. Good
round of interaction and clarification on job role, responsibilities,
overall culture and salary expectations. Then misery started.I
was forwarded to some recruiter in Seattle who contacted me after 3
days
for scheduling phone interview. That interview got suddenly postponed
and clashed with my vacation days, planned 1 year ahead. I requested
for
taking the interview after vacation (6 days): when I come back from
vacation and email them for next steps, they tell me the position has
been filled.
Tell me about something that you could have done better.
Several questions related to networking configuration and
troubleshooting
What are your safe behaviors?
3 design amazon product recommendation system
For
the music department we have to forecast the first two weeks of sales
so that we can have enough inventory, Dave Mathews Band is coming
out
with a new CD, how would you go about forecasting sales?
Implemetation of Hashing methodology
how much of your day do you smile?
not
any such difficult question but there were a lot of specific detailed
analytic questions to guage your understanding of the concepts!
Explain how you keep up the pace. I was taken off guard by this
question and asked her to be more specific.
OO design, without using database, design a IMDB senario:Simplified
question: A film has one director and several actors, while a person
can be both actor and director for one or many films, design the
classed
that can represent these situations.That is when showing a film, you
have things like title, director, a bunch of actors.then
showing a person, you need to show the movies he directed, and the
movies he acted in, show nothing if theres no movie he has ever
directed or acted in.
questions related to overall company vision at the Bezos level.
Some question related to compiler level and some practical experience
on Java.
All normal questions.
The
interviewer wanted me to create a structure that represents a binary
search tree and write a boolean function that verified to see whether a
parameter was a binary search tree.
Describe a time when you had to deal with a difficult customer.
There was no difficult questions
What is in the candidate bag?
Why do you want to work at Amazon?
How often do you find yourself smiling?
I
was asked a few big O questions which I expected but was also asked
some detailed network questions for which I was not prepared.
Bar
raiser was by far the most difficult all around, because there is no
way to really prepare and the question asked after the small talk about
the position and your prior experience, seems completely irrelevant to
the position. And as nerves are already high, it is frustrating because
of course you want to give an answer that will get you hired, but at the
sane time its hard if you dont understand what they are asking for.
An example is like estimate how many trees there are in Washington
state, or tell me the best way to get home from these two routes. And
of
course you cant ask for more information and if you try to add
information you may be told its irrelevant. I would suggest really
relaxing and try to understand what they are really trying to gain from
asking such strange off topic questions.
Write the function immediately
If
you strongly believed in an idea and were in a situation where your
colleagues did not support your idea, how would you react? The
question
was something along these lines
If you had to develop a scorecard to rank suppliers in your category
what metrics would you use? Why?
My personal failure s (2)
validate a binary tree s (3)
I think these are covered by their NDA. They want good leaders, if you
are one you will have no problem answering the questions.
Sorry, do not recall questions. All were behavior based on the
leadership principles you can find on their web site.
Given
a trie and a prefix, find the word (in the trie) that starts with some
subsequence of the prefix and also has the longest such subsequence.
s (2)
The math questions involved bottlenecking and resource allocation.
How many emails do you currently send per week?
Interview Questions
Interview Questions
Create a merge sort algorithm
How would you handle a hostile co-worker/manager?
Some question about merging arrays, which was already mentioned on
Glassdoor.
Suppose you were in charge of launching a new product. How would
you approach it, and what is your go-to-market strategy?
Given
a binary tree, convert it into a doubly circular linked list. The
structure of the tree was given by the interviewer and also the
structure of the doubly circular linked list. s (2)
Find the longest palindrome in a file of a very large size.
Im unable to offer questions specifically due to the disclosure that
Amazon asks you to sign.Be prepared for a situational interview.
Given an array A of n integers, in sorted order, and an integer x.design
an O(n)-time complexity algorithm to determine whether thereare 2
integers in A whose sum is exactly x. s (5)
Usual questions about data structures. Nothing you havent seen
before.
Give a description of most challenging project taken
given a large array of int return the length of the longest
increasing(non-necessarily-adjacent) sub-sequence s (3)
what is your favourite data structure?
Design a complex car from the ground up.
Can you think of an example of a scenario where you would want to
use a tree with more degrees of branching than a binary tree? s (4)
There
are 100 million records to search through in memory. What data
structure would you use? Explain in detail why you would choose that
over others?
What was a challenging problem you had to solve and how did you
solve it?
When would you use an interface, a abstract class, a virtual class.
Reason to work for Amazon
Print a binary tree level by level
Merge two sorted Array
As
the company would probably frown upon me giving interview specifics,
Ill explain the general knowledge base you should have when
interviewing with Amazon.They are very concerned with data
structures; namely structures that are very fast. Hash tables are a
staple, though questions involving tree and trie structures are also
asked quite often.Even if youre not applying to a position
requiring knowledge of networking, you should know the basics of how
it
works and how to avoid network congestion.
The length from one coordinate to origin
The most unexpected interview question was Why is it important for
you to learn new things?
Describe a difficult business decision you had to make where a
complete data set was not available.
how many years experience do you have
Given
a string of Rs and Gs, design an algorithm to produce a string with Rs
in the front and Gs after that. The number of flips from Rs to Gs or
otherwise should be minimum. The number of Rs and Gs in the end
need not
be same as that in the beginning, however the length of the entire
string should be the same. s (3)
Write
code for scheduling interviews of 20 candidates with 3 interviewers.
Each candidate has specific available times and can only interview at
those times.
Reverse a string
How would you build a system monitoring infrastructure for critical
services?
Delete extra spaces in a string. s (2)
Maps, Recursion, and good OOP are your friends.
Tell me a time when you had to design a system?
Read in a stream of numbers, print out the ones that are repeated an
odd number of times. s (2)
Java generics
Tell me about a time blah blah blah unimaginative questions
They make sure you can operate a computer. Its fairly basic.
Standard Algo question ; kept adding different constraints to make
problem progressively more difficult ; very interesting.
int array, such as [3, -4, 8, -10] find consecutive subset, get the
maximum sum.
If
you were asked to create content to help with a Kindle customer
service
problem, how you could go about creating that content given there are
different versions of the product and the problem applied to some of
them but not all of them? This is in addition to there being no central
place that stores all the help content for all the different versions of
Kindle.
Explain
a business analysis situation that you faced in your previous job that
was most challenging and how did you tackle it and what did you learn
and what was your strength to solve it?
Given
an integer set of numbers, print all the subsets. For some reason the
interviewer asked to print the supersets, but what he means is
subsets. s (7)
Average, Best & Worst case complexity of an BST. On what basis these
complexities are defined ?
What
is detail page latency? How can this be improved? How can this be
broken down (click an item and then what happens until new page
pops
up).
How would you reverse a string without using buffer variables?
I
dont want to give the exact interview question, but heres something
similar that any company might ask given a binary tree and an
integer
corresponding to a level in the tree, print the contents of the nodes in
that level of the tree from left to right.
Find the largest branch in a tree that is itself a binary search tree
Complexity analysis, discussion about best solution s (2)
Under DNA
You
have a log file with many different bits of user activity. How would
you go about finding specific three page user sequences for sessions
that met certain criteria.
Implement sort using list
Check if a BST is mirrored
Under NDA- cannot share this.
Describe a binary tree ?
How would you remove common elements from a two arrays.
Details on how you specifically were involved in the success of a
product launch.
flattening a tree to a file
String reversal, OS concepts, Object oriented designing concepts
What is an abstract class? Why is composition better than inheritance?
Difference between abstract class and interface? When would you use
interface over abstract class?
validate BST
How would you stop a cross-site request attack?
Tell me about a time you used analysis to make a business-critical
decision. Walk me through the analysis and outcome.
What would you do to come in and improve our processes in staffing?
What are the challenges in designing an application
Kth largest element in tree.
How would you begin to design software for an elevator system?
design an elevator class
Write a program to get all permutations of a string
Find a subset string specified in a big string.
What would you consider one of your failures?
how to get the most significant bit from a byte? s (3)
Interview Questions
Q. Describe the best achievement in your current job and why
Why Amazon?
Given
some array such as {4, 2, 5, 3}, write a function that would take in
the array and a number that would return how many pairs add up to
the
number. s (2)
how to find a number in a circularly sorted array? s (2)
Determine if two strings are anagrams. s (2)
What analysis would you use to understand if we should increase the
price of Amazon Prime Membership
Design a GPS
How would you troubleshoot a problem after launching a new service?

Tell me your background.

Code Fibonacci function in both iterative and recursive.
Write a java program to calculate the frequency of the online series
data.
What do you think is different when you have huge data set?
Does Change Bother You?
Questions were in the category of data structures and algorithm
e.g., searching algorithms, big-O, caching implementations.
Linked list based question
whats the most difficult technical challenge that you faced and how
did you solve it
About testing a Client Server model
What happens after entering Amazon.com into the address bar?
Explain Factory method and singleton design
Find all of the non-concentric palindromes in a string. Do so in linear
time.
Design an object oriented system for a deck of cards
Tell me about yourself.
As a buyer, how would you grow our department/category?
Describe a time when you have identified a bottleneck in the process
and introduced a change in process.
A variation of the K-nearest neighbour problem, and how do you scale
it?
How to convert a bst to doubly linked list s (2)
Describe some project management methodologies that you use,
strengths and weaknesses of each, etc.
Write a method to decide if the given binary tree is a binary search
tree or not. s (4)
Write an atoi function
If you had to incorporate a new state into the US how would you do it
What would I do in a situation where someone made a big error in
price on the website
Write
an algorithm/code in C to do integer multiplication and division
without using multiplication nor division operators. Do the same thing
for partitioned algorithm/parallelizable (suitable in parallel
processing) s (3)
Traverse nodes in a binary tree s (10)
Given a binary search tree and a number find the closest node to that
number. s (2)
What are different types of memory? s (2)
Find intersection of two arrays and how to handle duplicates
Write a function that determines if a given string is a palindrom
I will not give away the interview questions since Ive signed the NDA.
However, the advises I can offer is:1:
make sure you are FULLY prepared before you attend the interview,
they
are not EASY. by FULLY prepared, I mean, do a very serious review on
your data structures and algorithms!2: Never begin solve the
question before you completely understand what the question is
asking.
most of the time the interviewers instruction maybe misleading, not
quite accurate or hard to follow. If that happens, do not be afraid to
ask for clarifications.3: Try an example after you write your
code. remember to take care of boundary cases such as empty array
or
null pointer exceptions4: If you prefer working alone, let your
interviewer know, they can let you working alone and come back, or
they
will try their best not staring at you.5: Be FULLY PREPARED and good
luck!
Given a random array with integers, find every pair that sum up to a
certain number. s (4)
Tell us about some of the work you have done, and what challenges
you had developing that code.
Pretty standard
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Given
a tree, output a linked list of all nodes in the tree ordered by level.
For example, root, then all nodes at the next level, then the next.
Write the code for the question in 15 minutes!
How would you rate your Excel skills? Then she asked about plexi
tables.and I had no idea what they were.
Given an array and a sum, determine if any of the items add up to
sum. Do a linear space solution and constant time solution. s (2)
Various
questions covering the whole gamut of leadership, project
management,
design, coding, decision-making, personnel challenges, etc.
A question about anagram
Interview Questions
Justify the suduku s (3)
What is a hash table and when should it be used?
provide an algorithm for shortest prefix matching string
implement a queue from stack s (2)
What abilities or skills do you possess that might be suitable towards
working for Amazon?
All technical questions had to do with scalability. All management
questions had to with estimating/reporting time to finish.
What is the difference between fixed effects and random effects?
General questions.
Given two sets of numbers find the elements in A that appear in B (set
intersection) s (3)
a dynamic programming questions (cant disclose because of NDA)
How would you resolve a conflict in opinions with a colleague?
How do you find if two values in an array sum to a given value? Make it
as efficient as possible. s (2)
If
you were going to acquire a company, but could only look at their
income statement, balance sheet, or cash flows, which would you pick
and
why?
How would you set up a wine shop on Amazon.com?
Name 3 things you would improve about the Amazon.com experience.

Amazon/AtoZ
expect that all employees exhibit leadership qualities, so they ask
specific behavioral questions related to their leadership prinicples
(which can be found online).
Design a system for reservations at a restaurant.
Print the levels of an n-ary tree
How would you approach this current business problem we are having?

Traverse a binary tree in order.

How would you know what content to provide for the Kindle?
Math scenario with production and assembly possible outcomes
Interview Questions
Design an algorithm to find the common sequence of two strings
Do you have any questions for me?
How
would you deal with a client who wants to just run with a data
integration project rather than planning it out with you involved?
How would you change the user experience on the website?
Write the pseudo code for a script to pull information out of a mail log.

Given
a customer order of N items, design and implement a class that will
most efficiently by space place the order in various size boxes s (4)
What are the 3 main financial statement pieces, and which is the most
important in assessing a company?
Trie dictionary
Describe with a written code example the usage of an Oracle RANK
OVER PARTITION BY analytic function
Given an array of int, find sum of the most common int.
Tell
me a time when you didnt handle a situation as well as you could
have,
what would you do differently, how should you have handled the
issue?
Interview Questions
How would you find if a list of strings, at least one is a prefix of
another?
There
is an error with the price displayed on the site. 1000s of people have
bought it at that discounted price. How will you tackle that situation.
Mention 10 success metrics for X product.
Talk about an instance where you demonstrated leadership.
Convert a number to an array of characters without using to_s s (2)
What is the difference between a thread and a process?
First Round1. given some big-o compexities, asked to rank them from
the fastest to slowest..2. given a sorted array partially rotated, search
for an element, basically just regular binary search with a tweak very
common interview problem, solutions can be found anywhere on line
I
never saw the problem before, did manage to come up with a solution,
though kinda clumsy..Second Round1. given a bunch of trees,
and each node in the trees only has a parent pointer, you are given
two
randomly chosen nodes from the trees, test if the nodes are from the
same tree2. OOP design Implement a system to help different
airlines validate their package dimensions(if a certain package is
allowed to be carried onboard.)Third Round1. some random chat
about my school, coursework, etc2. determine the odd/even parity of a
number very
standard interview question again, can be found in that famous
interview book Programming interivews exposed, but again..lol I
didnt
read that book at that time, did come up with a solution though, just
took me some timeSo do read that book before you come to the
interviews..Fourth Round1. some tivial questions about oop/stacks,
etc2. againcount the number of ones in the binary representation of
a number..surprised that got asked the same question.3.
some tree problem againgiven a tree, and each node has a parent
pointer, given two nodes, find their least common ancestor..
How would you fix the US economy?
Why do you want to work for us?
Interview Questions
What is the hardest thing in moving a team to Agile? s (4)
Why did you apply to this job?
Describe a time when you experienced a problem with a vendor and
how did you handle it?
how to design a neutral system
How do you implement a hash structure?
Tell me about your professional experience?
How would you go about selecting a target market to launch this
particular product
write an algorithm to do a merge sort in assembly language
different between array and heap s (3)
How would you redesign the homepage of Amazon.com?
Why Amazon
find the 2nd-largest node in a binary tree
How would you, specifically, build Amazon Web Services?
Write an algorithm to determine if 2 linked lists intersect s (13)
list some search algorithms and discuss complexity and usage of
them.
Probably
the most difficult question they asked me was, he put a binary tree on
the whiteboard and I had to write a function that would find if the tree
was symmetrical or not. Anyone whos familiar with data structures
and
recursion should be fine with this, just dont freak out when they
propose the question. s (3)
Who is your best employee now and what makes them the best?
A lot of questions like tell me about a time you .
What is polymophsm for OO?
Amazon
is preparing to move from their old campus to their new one in Seattle.
They are looking for someone to oversee the entire project. You will be
presenting to the board 1 week on your plan. What do you present and
why?
Given
two very large binary trees T1, with millions of nodes, and T2, with
hun- dreds of nodes, create an algorithm to decide if T2 is a subtree of
T1. s (6)
You
have a sentence that has a grammatical error, and the sentence has
been
broken into a parse tree. The grammatical error is because of an
interaction between two words. Find the minimum complete phrase
that
includes the grammatical error. s (2)
What is the most in-depth analysis you have ever completed?
What is hash collision? How to solve it?
Given int arraySum = 10Find number of unique integers that sum up
to 10 fro that array s (2)
what are ways to eliminate bottle necks
Find k largest/smallest number in a series of numbers. What data-
structures will you use? Code it on white board. s (5)
How would you design x system. Now imagine you need to scale that
1000x
What would u do if deadline is approaching and ur product is not
finished? s (4)
What are examples of some of the deals you have done?
Interview Questions
Write a function to serialize a binary tree.
Are you happy? How can Amazon make you happier?
Tell me about a time where a manager wasnt there to oversee you
and how you handled your job.
When can you start?
How to find the least common ancestor for a binary tree.
How would you go about searching for a movie based on the letter of
the movie entered from the smart phone
How would you design a training plan for all facilities nationwide and
keep employees current with ongoing continuing education?
If you were given a project with no clear goal or resources, how would
you approach it?
If you were the CFO of amazon, what metrics would you look at every
day to see how well your company is doing?
Tell us how you solved a difficult problem
Create an algorithm that will navigate a maze.
How to design a system which tells about movies going on each zip
codes along with their showtimes and theatres
Consider
a system with fragmented memory. So when the user invokes a
malloc(N)
there may be a possibility that N consecutive locations cant be
allocated. But chunks of memory that adds to N can be allocated.
Design a
data structure to store this information and write routines for
allocating memory given the size, read , write given number of bytes
to
read etc.
What is the difference between abstraction, encapsulation, and
inheritance?
How would you find if a sum exists between a pair of numbers in an
array. Give the algorithm and complexity.
How do you deal with ambiguity?
Do you prefer to work in a stable or unstable environment?
Describe a good report layout you would propose to senior
management that helps analyze the business in a meaningful manner

Why do you want to work for Amazon?

What type of processes improvement have you made at work?
reverse a linked list
What did you find most difficult about your previous job?
How would you index a phone directory? What data structures would
you use? Implement it.
The assignment problem
Will you please discuus the most innovative project/product you have
led or produced in your current role?
You
are given an array of integers where every integer occurs an even
number of times, except one integer that appears an odd number of
times.
Return the odd occurring integer. Write functioning code and read it to
me when youre done. s (3)
What
is the technical project or achievement you have worked on that you
are
most proud of, and what is one that you are least proud of your
involvement.
Coding question with follow up on how efficient is that
judge if a tree is balanced s (3)
How would you do years ago?
TCP 3 way handshake method
Given million records, sort them out using 1K memory. Suggest the
best algorithm to do this
Although
not unexpected I found the question regarding past mistakes difficult
because you have to measure your answer based on what you think
they
will expect.
Can you tell me about a time you had to convince someone to do
something they did not want to do?
What is the percentage difference between two numbers?
Design a clone of a web-based note taking system. Design various
services for that system.
If I handed you a rubiks cube and told you that it had to be solved by
tomorrow, how would you respond? s (4)
What is the relationship between an object and a class?
Tell me about a time when you were leading a group, were assigned a
goal, and you did not reach it.
Advantages of hash table
Design a recommandation algorithm
Tell me about a time when you had a group conflict and how did you
overcome this conflict?
How do you motivate people?
One
interviewer drew on the dry erase board and had me work through
various
puzzles. He wanted to see my thought process and how I work through
challenging situations was I able to think outside the box, come up
with viable solutions, etc.
Definitely a lot of technical questions. Be sure you know your stuff.
Having
to pick up n items from a warehouse find an algorithm to minimize the
cost having a cost function to go from one item to another. s (2)
All behavioral questions for the role I interviewed for.
We
did some data analysis and noticed that the phase of the moon was
directly correlated to the productivity of our fulfillment center staff.
What could be causing that?
Would you say you feel fortunate, unfortunate, lucky or unlucky and
why.
What is your biggest barrier to leadership and how do you surmount it?

Tell me about a failure and how you overcame it.

How will you market Amazon cloud drive in Brazil?
What complexity would sorting add to an array list? s (2)
A
list with a set of integers. All elements appear even number of times
while one appear odd number of times. Find this number that appear
odd
number of times s (4)
Give me an example of a website you created?
You
need to design a system to provide answers to factorials for between 1
and 100. You can cache 10 numbers. How would you arrange/manage
that
cache, and what is the worst case for lookup on a cache miss? s (3)
How does your research relate to neural networks.
On a scale of 1 10 how whacky can you be?
Have you proposed an idea to your company that would save the
company time and money? How was it received?
Tell me about your failures?
Have you used Amazon web site to buy a product or service? what do
you like or dislike about the website?
What is a mistake you made that youve really regretted?
how would you trouble shoot a slow download of content on a Kindle
device? s (3)
There
was a question that was a Dutch National Flag problem. It is
essentially about grouping colors, however he used integers, positive,
negate, and zero to do the same thing.
Are you comfortable working nights, weekends, and/or holidays?
Say
you had a dictionary of words. How would you set it up? And what
would
you do if you needed to search for a word (what type of search)? About
how long would it take for you to search for the word using Big O
notation?
Give me an example where you used data to defend your position on a
decision made
Was
asked twice regarding specifics where I made a change or
recommendation
that made a significant difference in my team being able to exceed
their goals.
Math question regarding units per labor hour.
Cant
post due to NDA! But none of the questions was too difficult-prepare
for the behavioral type questions and read a bit about pricing.
How do you deal with management?
Implement a queue using two stacks
How many fields have you worked with in excel?
Write a function to validate a binary tree s (2)
Do you have any warehouse experience
Pick an Amazon product and tell me how you would double revenue on
it in the next year.
Design a Parking Lot in terms of OOP concept
Interview Questions
What is method overloading and method overriding?
Can you pass a written software test?
What is your best negotiation? And, what was the outcome?
All sorts of tricky behavioral questions.
If
we are shipping 2 products to the same customer but these products
are
contained in different warehouses, What are some of the factors that
we
need to consider so that the transportation cost will be minimal and
the
customer will receive the products in the least amount of time?
Reverse an array
Binary tree traversal
Give an example of time when you found a simple solution to a
seemingly difficult problem.
Whats your favorite Excel function?
I
was asked if I was willing to relocate. I said I was not able to
relocate; however, I could travel. (I was applying specifically for a
position in my city).
How would you roll out this idea in 4 months time? (you are
responsible for every aspect on it from conception to close-out)
Implement a string matching algorithm that matches a given string
prefix to the longest matching string in a dictionary.
what do you know about distributed systems
What is a priority queue?
Case Example request for GTM market strategy involving B2B Services

How would you design the game monopoly?

Design a database and tell me the entities and constrains you will
include for some business model.
Tell me about a time you had to deal with a difficult vendor?
There was a question that was loosely case based regarding how to
approach a specific business situation.
How to route trucks for delivery to a number of customers in Seattle
with time windows?
How would you build a reservation system.
Math Question basic algebra
Find the node at which two linked lists intersect
Do
you know what time it is? I dont think I have time for this. I really
dont have time for this. Maybe someone else can do this.
Interview Questions
Describe a difficult communication with a coworker.
Design a library in an object-oriented manner.
Also he asked me Define Testing
How would you reduce the size of the cookies in browser?
What factors would you analyze, and how, in order to make a go/no go
decision on bringing Amazon Fresh into a foreign market?
Given a listed list and an integer, find two numbers in the list that sum
to the given number (Test cases)
Write an algorithm to check if an array holds a string value that you
are passing in.
Interview Questions
What is your experience with Access, with SQL?
You
said you did xyz on your resume. How do you know this was
successful?
If you keep going with this strategy how will you be able to determine
if this is no longer a successful strategy & you need to shift
gears?
Design an object oriented design for Black Jack game
How would you implement a file system.
Interview Questions
Dont recall exact questions. Felt pretty standard.
is the binary tree a mirror reflection of another
how would you design how a cellphone implements its contact list
when you press a certain letter.For
example, If you press M it will tell you all the names starting with M.
then if you press MI it will tell you all names starting from MI and so
forth. s (5)
Youre
in charge of new business venture x. What do you evaluate in vetting
the business potential? Now what is your estimate of the volume we
could
move (with numbers)? s (2)
Why did you apply for this position?
What is put option?
Interview Questions
Why Amazon?
Youve
been tasked with preparing a business case about whether to continue
offering Amazon Prime. What elements would you use to make your
case?
Given the Node in the graph, how would you find if the node leads to
the cycle.
If Wal-Mart came out with new very aggressive promotions for
Christmas, as Senior Financial Analyst, what would you do?
What is Hashtable? What is BST? How to avoid collision in hashing?
Compare these two.
Walk
me through your design for a Restaurant Point of Sale system This
was for a project manager job. A technical PM, but really?
Find a longest Palindrome in a given string. s (3)
Tell me about a time when you had to influence the business to try
something new.
Print all the possible permutations of a character string.
A financial math type question
Implement the floodfill algorithm of a paint program s (2)
Algorithm to produce the power set of a given set. s (2)
Tell me about how you organize your day.
say sth about hash table. s (2)
What is the difference between a breadth-first search and a depth-first
search?
Do you know that location of the job is Seattle?
Tell me a time where you had to work with a difficult customer?
The
math problem was the most difficult if you are not used to algebra
type
word problems. I am assuming that none of the people interviewing do
this kind of thing on a daily basis. s (2)
design of a web crawler
How would you program Monopoly?
Optimize some Algorithm
If you had unlimited resources, how would you change Amazon?
Non concentric palindrome
What hours are you available to work?
How will you drive demand gen for our product?
What is the fast sorting algorithm and why? s (4)
Describe some of the ways you would scale a web-based application to
handle huge traffic?
Interview Questions
when looking back, what is the design change you would have made?
integer palindrome: give character which appeared max in string
What position are you qualified to perform?
Design
a Subscriber Broker Publisher architecture (a) running on a
machine; (b) running on a cluster. Write the code for the 3
classes.Details:
there are Events, specified by an event type and a blob of detailed
info. Each subscriber subscribes with a Broker for a certain event type
that it wants to get. Subscribers send events to the broker, and the
relevant subscribers need to be notified. s (2)
Print all permutations of a given string. s (4)
Design
a client/server messaging protocol to facilitate a web-based
spreadsheet program. What would the object model look like on the
client
side?
How would you go about making a case for rolling back a feature?
How do you like this city (by the HR)?
What type of leader are you?
Interview Questions
I was asked to solve a real world business problem but without all of
the background that I needed to answer the question.
Each
question was a What would you do in this situation? question. They
arent out to get you, they only want to know your thought process.
Interview Questions
None
were really difficult, but I had diffculty answering anything that
required impromptu math. Im a spreadsheet guy. I.e. if you could buy
the same quantity of two products one with a 10% margin and a
higher
cost and one with a 20% margin and a lower cost which would you
buy? s (2)
You have an integer array of length N, containing values in the range
1,2,3N^2. Sort the array in O(N) time s (2)
How
would you go about creating an automated process to figure out bid
amounts for keywords in a portfolio with a billion keywords for a new
product.
3 metrics on how to measure success on a software solution that has
just been implemented in the page s (2)
Why Amazon?
what do you know about Amazon and this position?
what is the bubble sort algorithm s (3)
Reverse a string.
Suppose
you want to migrate to a new platform but new platform has different
functionality from old one. How do you migrate seamlessly?
Hash Table description, Max heap
Why do you want to work for Amazon?
Why Amazon?
Many questions on Excel spreadsheets and functions.
How could you enhance our website?
how would you price this product
Interview Questions
Interview Questions
he asked me regarding my projects, mentioned on my resume and den
asked me couple of technical questions..
What would your manager say is an area of opportunity for you?
we
have 3 log files which contain details of custId, PageId, date/time of
visit. find 3 most frequently visited pages (in order ..if we have 5
pages A B C D E and the entries are sorted by date . say sequence is A
B
D A B C D A B ) which were visited by a customer then answer shud be
AB
D ( like even if sequence is D A B it wiill be counted as A B D
What does Product Management mean to you?
given a stack implementationfind min and max.
Was there a time you went against the advice of your supervisor /
advisor?
write
a method which takes x/y coordinates for a point for a graphics
program
and implement a bucket-fill (change all the surrounding pixels of the
same color to the new color)
They
gave a 15 minute description of an area of their business and asked
me
to come up with a new business idea in the next 15 minutes that was
unique and potentially profitable.
how will do test Amazons Kindle application
Write code for a tree whose number of children is configurable
Design a game
Interview Questions
Explain a situation in school or in your career where you had to be the
leader?
Hard to say I tried to get as many details about the position as
possible and it feels like I did most of the talking.
what was your biggest challenge?
How would you keep full stock at all times
What is your biggest business mistake?
Without
using any high level language methods (such as indexOf()) write a
function that takes two strings (A and B) and checks to see if B is in
A, if it is return the index that B starts at.
How have you resolved conflict?
Linked list questions s (2)
How would you implement a priority queue? s (2)
How would you go about scoping an API documentation project?
What change would you make on our web site?
I was asked what type of metrics and reporting I analyze and how I
used that date to make business decisions
Have you worked in complex technical environments?
A
lot of questions on OOP (what is the basic structure of a text
editor) and data structures (hashes, linked lists, etc.). You needed to
know Java for that position.
Lets
say a VP came to your desk and said we needed a timeline of past
orders
and gave you no further direction. What would you do?
Given two large files of integers, only one byte difference. Find out this
byte if memory is limited.What if memory is unlimited?Tell the
complexity of your algorithm and analyze it. s (3)
Give an example of a time that you worked with a difficult client, how
you handled it and the outcome.
serialize binary tree s (3)
distributed hash table and uses
How would suggest we fix the following actual problem we encounter
on a daily basis?
What would I do to iimprove the exposure of product X
What sorts of costs does Amazon face as an online seller of goods? s
(2)
Given
a set of coins of arbitrary denominations, write an algorithm to
calculate all possible ways to generate change for a given amount.
what was the most difficult situation you have faced in a work
environment
1. Find common elements between two arrays of integers.2. Find
cycles in a graph.3. Efficiently find duplicate elements in an array of
numbers with bounded entries (for example, elements are between 0
and 99).4. Reverse word sequence in a string inplace.5. Efficiently find
all Pythogorean triplets in a given array of integers.6. Find all
anagrams in a list of words.7. Set operations. s (2)
Having
a reference string and an array of strings how do we write an efficient
algorithm to find which string in the array contains the same letters
as the reference array
Write a program which picks the first 2 highest numbers in a
sequence?
You are going to miss tomorrows deadline, how do you and your team
handle it?
List
all anagrams in a file. Assumptions: case-insensitive, a-z characters
only, one word per line. For example, if the file contains dog, cat,
ddd, goo, act, god output dog, god, act, cat s (8)
Refuse to disclose
We have numbers from 1 to 52 that are put into a 51 number array,
whats the best way to find out which number is missing? s (3)
If you were to invest in other countries, what would be the contributing
factors in your decision?
I
want to design a database similar to imdb, design it, and tell me the
structure/fields so that 1. given a specific year, you can find top 5
grossing films 2. given an actor, return all his costars 3. all movies
with more than 3 cast members.
Describe what you would do with XYZ?
Write an algorithm to return the intersect of two arrays. s (4)
All questions asked were within normal types of interview questions. s
(3)
You are to design the transportation system for a building.
Given a list of n numbers. All numbers except one are unique. Find the
number with duplicate entry. s (7)
Explain the pros and cons of the Amazon Prime shipping program.
what is the most significant deal youve ever done?
are you willing to come in for an interview?
Questions on binary search tree. How to insert into tree. State big O.
Design a control system for a multi-car elevator system
It
says in your resume that you created effective marketing plans. What
is that supposed to mean? How do you really know it was effective?
Making positive revenue isnt enough.
What one thing in your career to date are you most proud of?
How to compute nth Fibonacci number.
Was asked to describe what I would do in a situation where I didnt
know the correct Amazon approach for a problem. s (2)
How would you handle an employee who showed up to work drunk? s
(2)
Math Problem: You have an upstream Picking department that feeds
two downstream packing departments: A and B.75% of your Pick
volume goes to department A, which has a packing rate of 150 unites
per labor hour (uph).25% of the Pick volume goes to department B,
which is for large items, and has a pack rate of 25 units per labor
hour.Your pickers pick both large and small items throughout the day
at an overall average rate of 100 units per labor hour.You
have 25 people today for all 3 departments, and you absolutely must
pack 7,500 units in department A to meet a customer promise metric.
How
do you allocate labor to balance the flow in your department if you
work
a 10 hour shift? Do not assume breaks or lunches in your
answer.Department % of volume Rate (uph) People Daily VolumePick
100% 100 ?? ??Pack A 75% 150 ?? 7,500Pack B 25% 25 ?? ?? s (2)
Find longest dominoe train in a generated set of 10-15 dominoes.
How does the internet work?
How do you think the cost for an Amazon Prime account was decided?

Given two (huge) sets, what is an efficient way to find their

intersection? s (4)
Two
dates are given to a function. The function should return if the dates
are exactly one month apart, less than one month apart or more than
one
month apart.
If you had 5,623 participants in a tournament, how many games would
need to be played to determine the winner s (50)
Why do you want to work for Amazon? The hiring manager has asked
this question a few times!
Implement a single linked list add and size methods using java ?
How do you insert into a binary tree? s (2)
how to design database for company like fandango change movies
regularly, have different show times per date etc.
How to identify network / traffic congestion and debug scenarios and
tools
This system is failing intermittently; troubleshoot why/how.
What was your biggest professional mistake and how did it impact
you?
Whats the biggest problem you see with our company? s (2)
How would you price the S3 service?
How would you implement a lookup/datastore without relying on a
RDMS?
Implement a function to validate whether a given binary tree is a BST
(i.e. write an isBST() function). s (9)
How would you set the pricing strategy for Amazon web services?
What is deadlock s (2)
Have you ever had a time when you disagreed with your teammates?
Tell me about your operations experience and the structure of the
team you led?
What do you think about the DTP?
How would you optimally sort an unsorted random list of numbers by
using multiple computers. s (2)
What is an immutable object?
Give me an example of what you were directly responsible for in a
retail store (product)?
Basic coding questions that would normally have been EXTREMELY
easy:shuffle an array in place in O(n)
Was asked to priovide an example where the use of IP Selective ACK
would be used and why
There is an array of numbers, containing the integers 1-n, how can you
find the sum of the numbers in that array? s (3)
You have web application, which runs on a server and your boss comes
and up say its very slow, what do you do?
I
had a difficult question about a cuboid composed of smaller cubes.
How
many cubes are there where exactly two faces of the cube are
exposed? s (4)
If you were the CEO of Amazon.com, what is a new line of business
that you would consider launching?
You have to support 5000 online stores. What technology would you
use to support them?
what is your biggest setback?
Please describe your process improvement experience and how it
benefited the company?
Suppose
you have been asked to setup a new company that was going to do
what
netflix does. How would you go about setting up the
network/databases/software?
Asked
to extract numbers from a list of alphanumeric strings. For example if
string is qw34rt56, new list should contain 34 and 56. New list
should
have unique numbers and should be in ascending order. They
requested
write complete code and tell over the phone. s (2)
Tell me about your skills with Excel. s (2)
If you were going to plan two new distribution center locations for
Amazon where would you locate them and why.How would you decide
what product to put in each DC s (2)
What are the first 2 integers that, when added together, equal 10 in a
very large array of unsigned integers? s (6)
you had experience in [1], [2] and [3] how do you think Amazon will
benefit from these experiences?
Design an elevator control system.
If
the SVP of this division communicates to you the business goal is to
double revenue for this product in three years, how do you go about
creating a three-year business plan that will achieve the goal?
How would you design a chat system?
Sort the first 100 numbers from a incoming input stream of milions of
numbers. s (2)
In
a 10 hour shift, how will you staff to achieve a goal of sending out
7500 packages. More info was provided re: the labor hours, laborer
productivity, etc.
Reverse a linked list. s (2)
Tell me about yourself.
How to detect loops in a linked list without using a data structure s
(4)
Find if there are any pairs of numbers in a list which can be added up
to a target number.
How would you determine the next country for Amazon expansion?
How would you design an elevator control system in the highrise?
How do you find sequences of consequtive integers in a list that add to
a particular number.
Design Netfix..website, Database design, checkout flow, inventory
management etc.
Give
an example of an idea you surfaced to drive the companies business,
tell us how you sold your idea, how successful you were and what you
would have done differently upon reflection
given an array of records of size n, n is in the order of billions,each
record stores the co-ordinates (x,y,z)find the m-closest records to the
origin.
Describe a difficult technical issue you faced. How did you go about
solving it?
the Coding question
Also,
given a large list of stars, with theyre co-ordinates, give a smaller
number of closest stars, to earth, with earth as origin, and the best
and most optimum way to do this.
B Tree to implement searching for phone number
The
hardest questions were around customer situations, aimed at
assessing
how I thought about revenue/business from the customer standpoint.
Some
math required, but nothing hard.
Number of 1s in binary representation of integer? s (11)
How would you implement integer division if your language did not
offer it. s (5)
Since you are working on web application, what would be the problem
you think Amazon would encouter ?
There were 2 questions which was based on dynamic programming.
Questions from careercup.com
The data structure questions were difficult as they asked very low level
details on hashes and such.
How would you reverse a linked list in Java? s (5)
You are to write a spell checker. Discuss the API, Data Structures and
Algorithms. s (2)
If you saw someone steal a quarter. Would you report it? s (10)
What is your greatest achievement in life? Tell me a success story of a
project you spearheaded.
What one thing would you change about amazon?
You
seem more like a coordinator than a program manager, why should I
hire
you as a program manager. (It seemed provocative rather than
information
gathering).
They will ask many questions about the current service and how it can
be improved.
Determine whether the binary representation of a number if a
palindrome or not, code it on a white board. s (8)
Implement a simple load balancing algorithm in pseudo code (over the
phone) s (2)
Sorting a list of some random type s (2)
What do you see as the most important part of the business model?
Given
a database of all the known stars, describe how you would determine
the
200 stars closest to Earth. What is the efficiency of the algorithm you
described?
The most technically challenging work/project. Describe that and tell
why was it so.
Write a program to count the number of words in a file. s (5)
Describe what do you write in a functional specification? s (2)
How would you handle working with a team in India
Design a functional specification for a video rental store.
Nothing
particularly difficult or unexpected but you must really show
enthusiasm for progressing your career its vital. The STAR technique
is an absolute must all answers are expected in this format. There
are
14 leadership principles by which Amazon live and you would need to
have an answer prepared for each of them it is a really good idea to
mention the principles liberally during interview as they are mentioned
endlessly during every meeting/interaction in Amazon. Its an
endurance
test more than anything.
Why did you apply to this role?
find common ancestor in binary tree(Not binary search tree)
distributed computing
noo easy
they will ask you what are the risks in online transection, and how one
can reduse them
How would you reduce the time taken to transfer 4GB data into 4GB
pen drive by 50% from the current benchmark.
Nothing
unexpected. Signed NDA, so Ill not tell the specific questions. All
questions were for basic usage of data structures. If you studied
Computer Science and exercise to solve and code basic algorithm
problems, youll do well.
The analytical thinking questions were not easy.
Questions were not adapted at all.
Tree traversal question
Got a puzzle to solve, out of the blue.
What is the advantage of JSON over xml
they
only focus on two things, generic architecture level discussion, how
would you design a specific scalable system. Mostly question will pose
an ongoing problem in the group and you need to brain storm solution
with them. Nothing that difficult , it is only that you need to apply
common sense.second thing they focus is your people management
skills, again all question are really practical and if you try to give a
bookish answer you will be caught..so if you do not really believe in
your answer you will not be able to make itfor e.g. you have an
excellent super brillant team member in your team, better than all
others but his behavior is bad, he does not talk properly if someone
approaches him for help of solution, he literally insults themwhat
would you doNow reallt think about your answerif you want to
preach this guy..it will not work out..it is his naturedo you really
want to throw him out of your teamha ha you probably will not like
tobecause these kind of people bring 10X value to organization
what
will you dosimilarly there are many trap questions..if you try to be
politically and inetrview wise correct you will not make it
swich stacking; details of routing protocols
hands on with an app and test the app
Implement code to calculate the Fibonacci number.
How to monitor web service?
deeper questions once you reveal the basic answers
What would your enemies say about you?Would you use normal (non
amazon) forums to give advice to people on how to use our products?
Two
coding questions, one binary search tree, and one depth first search. I
was asked to think about alternative ways to solve the second
questions.
I wasnt thrown by any of the questions.
Implement an online board game from scratch. Starts with classic
coding questions and ends with the overall system design.
Given
a string. Suppose all its characters can be jumbled up and all possible
strings are arranged in an alphabetical order. Now given a number n,
find the nth word in the ordered list of words.
Imagine Amazon is considering introducing Free Giftwrapping for
Books.The
customer pays $4 for giftwrapping the product. In 2008 we
giftwrapped
700,000 Units and expecting a growth for 2009 of 12%. Our average
revenue per Unit is about $20 .Would you recommend launching this
and why?Make assumptions wherever appropriate.Price Elasticity of
Demand is -2
Business
cases were unexpected since the recruiters specifically told me that
the first interview would have been about my CV & work experience.
What is your biggest achievement?Give me an example where you had
to use negotiating skills?
The
technical problems were of medium difficulty and not unsolvable. Just
designed to show that you know how to think about software
problems.
I solved the problem in Java, but the hiring manager was more into C
or C++, and didnt have much knowledge in Java.
just
prepare algorithms , there interview process is quite very easy but
they focus on alternative solutions like alternative to AJAX etc ..
Was there ever a situation in which your actions or decision had a
negative impact on your co-workers?
Nothing, all was expected.
Repeating the question 3 times to make you feel uncomfortable.
Questions on Graph problems.
Tell me when you improved a product, despite you were receiving a
positive feedback from customers.
Which are the competitive advantages of Amazon vs its competitors?
There
was as such no hard question for me. But unfortunately i was not
prepared for this interview. Frankly this was my first ever interview.
So yes i was bit nervous and i didnt knew about the tips and tricks for
cracking the interview at that time. I was asked the following 2
questions:1. given a tree, do the level order traversal of the tree.
Explain the logic and write its proper code not pseudo-code.2 given a
link list, Reverse a Linked List in groups of given size. write its code.
While
no single question is difficult you have to prepare for dozens of
possible behavioral questions. The interview wears you down as the
interviewer repeatedly bombards you with scenarios. Sometimes there
can
be numerous follow-up questions on a single scenario.
The
technical problem wasnt something very difficult at first sight, but
the trick was finding out the most efficient solution, which involved
using tries. This solution was not implementable in 45 minutes, so the
interviewer asked me to implement a specific part from the solution.
There were very few behavioural questions, and nothing unexpected.
The
interviewers all wanted different examples to questions that were very
similar. After the first two interviews you are naturally bored of
answering competency based questions,
They asked me what was the most regretful thing Ive done regards
my colleges.
Most
unexpected- Recruiter was difficult to reach and had about <12hrs
warning before scheduling interview. The actual interviews went well-
the engineers were easy to talk to and walked through the problem
solving.
What was your greates failure and what did you learn from it?
this question is a bit difficult because of the limited time I was given to
code it.Given a binary tree with fields- {pointer to left child,poiter to
right child,next pointer}.Initially the next pointers are all NULL.Now
fill all the next pointers in each node with pointer to the node which
is immediately right to the node in the same level. The next pointer of
rightmost node in a level shold be NULL.It can be done using level
order traversal using a queue but the interviewer asked me to do it
without using queue or any extra memmory and in O(n) time.Hint: The
logic is to fill the next pointers in the (n+1) th level while trvelling in
the n th level.I was asked to code it
Was very optimistic about it but Als! i was sent back.
Business case
provide actual real life examples of various Amazon principles (dive
deep, disagree and commit, have backbone, etc)
vercent test can be a little difficult for freshers as all the tests
conducted are time bound.with practise and speed any graduate with
good communication and speed can get through!
Excel test
question about OSI model, where in it fits the switch
quasi-case on how I would improve the company at which I previously
worked if given the opportunity.
be prepared to work in a fast pace environment.it is amazing!
Tell me about a time you had to compromise?Tell me about a time you
had to take a decision without all the information?
What is the most important thing to recruit a new publisher/client?
The design problem in last interview was not difficult, but I think they
were looking for a specific answer.
Very
typical codeable question for an undergrad something you would get
from cracking the coding interview. Only one question was asked I
then
chatted with both interviewers for 45 minutes each separately for two
back-to-back interviews.
In
the first telephonic screening round, I was asked to explain my
background in brief. Then, I was told: Assume there are 100 million
text
files/novels. I need to design a text suggestion tool, based on the
100million novels, while the user is typing search text in Amazon
website.
Whats your favorite Excel formula?
a few scenario questions
What is the last time you asked your manager permission to do
something?
Good coding question
almost average difficult, no too difficult one
what would have done different in a project
Please explain your three top ideals for creating a smooth and
customer-oriented experience with IT support.
From
the beginning, they asked me very specific questions about my role,
experience and motivation to change. I always had to provide
examples on
how I manage my skills in my job. The often insist on the fact that
Amazon is frugal, and they are very informal to the extent that
this approach soon becomes differently formal. They use the STAR
approach, and to be honest I did not have unexpected questions. I
thought they would have discussed my assignment, but only the
technician
pronounced very superficial words on it.
A
web service is used by many teams. How do you release a new version
?
Sending emails or reminders to a mailing list of current users does not
guarantee a full response, what do you do?
A
lady buys goods worth 200 bucks from a shop (assuming the
shopkeeper is
selling goods at zero profit). The lady pays with a banknote worth 1000
bucks to the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper gets the change from the
next
shop & keeps 200 for himself & returns 800 to the lady. After
sometime the next shop owner returns the 1000 note saying it is fake
& takes his money back. How much loss did the shopkeeper suffer?
How do you improve the category home page?
Give an example where you need to use you disagreed with your
managers decision and hat you did to deal with the situation.
Why did you choose Amazon?
Design a class model for an invoicing system
Theoretical questions about algos I havent used for 10+ years.
Nothing majorly surprising
1 phone interview:- Talking about background and previous
experiences- Design Patterns- Big O notation concepts and examples-
Agile metodologies2 phone interview:- Find the element that appears
an odd number of times in an array where all elements except one
appear an even number of times.- Design a Data Structure for a
phonebook- Find if there are two elements in an int array that sum up
to a given x- Live coding of the solution to second problem through
collabedit.com- Talk about given solutions complexityOn site
interview:1 (Senior Product Manager)- Three Tell me about a time
you questions2 (SDE)- Given a 0-5 random int generator create a
0-7 random int generator.- Get k highest price in a list of n pairs (and
talk about complexity)3 (Senior SW Dev. Manager)- Two Tell me
about a time you questions- In-depth discussion about a schema I
drew on a whiteboard4 (SDE)- OO Design of an elevator system- Write
code to handle the system requests queue5 (SDE)- Solving a Puzzle
that involves graphs search- Write BFS code on a whiteboard
This
was my first interview and I obviously did not know what questions
would they be asking me so every question was like unexpected and
surprise for me. But I remember one question in particular They
asked
what was the most difficult and toughest thing in your life and the
same
question in an emotional sense and how you got through it
How did you make those decisions? What was your analysis?
They tested my analytical and Excel skills but at a proper analyst level.

They
asked me to explain how will I behave in several situations. They asked
me about situation that never happened to me so I had to lie
because
it was very uncomfortable to reply that situation never happened to
me.
None
of the technical questions were standard CS questions but they
werent that far off. There were list, graph, and other algorithm
questions, but they were given in the context of an actual use case at
Amazon, and then you needed to figure out what algorithm to use. For
instance, I got the How do you tell if a directed graph has a cycle?
question, but in the context of an Amazon use case.That said, it
might just be those set of Amazon reviewers I have done Amazon
interviews in the past for an intern position, where off-the-shelf
questions with no Amazon veneer were used.
Competency
2 questions:* Code a binary tree from an input of the like:[2, 4], [1, 2],
[4, 8], [5, 9], [1, 3], [2, 5], [3, 6], [3, 7]* Design (OO Language) a billing
system
not much difficult
not any. all questions were good algorithmic problems.
asked to explain the spanning tree protocol
Tell me a specific problem youve met doing your project, and how you
handled it.
What is the reason if the 5th page on google search is not loading
properly
tell me about your biggest failuretell me about an experience where
you were in trouble and were your analytical skills helped you to solve
your problemstalk to me about a time when you have been out of your
sphere of responsibility to go and help people in your teamWhat is the
achievement that you are most proud of in your life
What is your Project Managemet Style? should it not be Method?
IIS questions put me on the spot. IIS is not my specialty and that was
clearly shown on my CV.
One
question involve removing a node in a linked list with recursion I
was given a buggy piece of code and was asked to fix it. I was
distracted when I mentioned this would not work on a long linked list
so
I couldnt answer it but the engineer let it go anyway since we were
short on time
Suppose
you have a room with three lights inside it and there are three
switches arranged randomly outside the room. The room is completely
closed and you cant see anything through its walls. You are allowed
to
go into the room only one. So how can you tell whether which switch is
connected to which bulb.
who is a best suited for Amazon a crisis manager or a risk mitigator
How do you make Amazon service better ?
a
primitive class having two string attributes and one attribute list of
the class itself and then we have to get the each levels string
variabless printed.
Convert a number to a currency string: 1234,45 -> one thousand two
hundred thirty four dollars and forty five cents
They
asked when I took a decision which seemed wrong at the beginning
but
after a certain amount of time it revealed itself to be the right one.
None of the questions were very difficult as i was only asked from the
algorithm section.
What company should AMZN buy right now? Why? Give me names.
A
bucket is kept under the tap and the tap is opened to let out water.
Though water is flowing out, the bucket never seems to be full. why?
s (5)
There was none, pretty simple.
Writing code on a whiteboard is a bit of a challenge.
None
How do you feel that you would suit this position?
Say we are launching the new Amazon Premium program. Set the right
price for it.
You
have a file with 4 billion integers. Find an integer that doesnt exist
in the file, given that you have very little available memory on your
computer. s (5)
its only pure programming And dont know how there selection
process works.
what is the one thing you will change about amazon ? how will you
make decisions in absence of data ?
All questions were STAR.
why you leave Intel? is there any specified reason?
Nothing; several situation/behavioural psych questions
General questions about my knowledge on e-commerce, news in the
press, etc.
What is your drive to succeed
Question1: What did you do rise the bar in your previous position?
Question2: Give us an example of a situation you had to dive deep to
solve a ProblemQuestion3: Can you tell us about a situation where you
had to take ownership of a decision you made.
The
most difficult questions were from data structure implementation point
of view. They required a strong understanding of the problem
statement
to decide the correct data structure to implement. They were very
stern
about the required efficiency of the solution. Getting a solution wasnt
enough, we are expected to give the best solution we can possibly
think
of!
All question needed good amount of logical thinking.
Nothing really difficult
Lots
of questions like tell me about a time you had an idea that was
beneficial to the entire company. Just try to be as much specific as
possible and be sure you acted according to Amazons principles (find
them on companys websiet)
Tell
me about a time you had conflicts in the office and how did you solve
them. Tell me about a time you failed. Tell me about a time you
generated change in your organization
Lots
of questions on specific front end technologies: JS, CSS, etc. Asked to
code a simple JS function. No questions on fundamentals or algorithm.

Not so really. Most of the questions are expected ones, checking on the
knowledge of SQL, why amazon? and so on.
Nothing that I can think of now.
Asked me to design a Potato Chips Factory by OOAD means.
No particular difficult nor unexpected questions
Not really difficult if you prepare good examples of your previous work
experience.
Tell me a time when you developed an analytic tool to resolve a
problem
There was a questing on designing a distributed database
Have
you had a more junior person report to you that you believe had more
potential than you? If so, how did you help them to develop.
Be
prepared to have technical questions based on algorithms and date
structures like binary trees, but also for product-oriented questions
like how would you revamp the main page of Amazon
How did you know that your product was successful?
3 coding question.1.tree,2.algorithm based on string,3.linked list.
On
the spot variation /modifications on operational flow problems (makes
you think on your toes) what if the demand increases by 20% where
would the bottle neck be and how would you change your plan
What do I see as the main challenges of the role? Have I ever dealt
with difficult clients? Not really difficult.
What would be the first thing youd change in your new job?
there wasnt any difficult question just general questionn
The analytical exercises were tricky, but only because one is not used
to solve them from school days.
Thinking of fresh examples was difficicult.
What is your biggest weakness
How can you forecast your book sales in Spain for the next year? (no
other given information)
Given
a dataset, only the first variable has been confirmed as an
independent
variable. There is no other info. How to build a model or run a
regression?
Nothing particularly unexpected, the problem was around the right
level, just lacked experience and confidence
The
system design question. Was asked to design a restaurant booking
system. The interviewer digged into the details as we discussed the
problem and added more and specifications.
The questions are not EXACTLY around Amazon principles but around
them. You have to adapt your personal examples.
Biggest professional failure
What happens when you type an address into a browser and press
enter
If
you had to calculate how many packages Amazon ships on an average
day
and you couldnt ask anyone and couldnt research it either, how
would
you do it? I was later told that they are not supposed to ask trick
questions anymore.
what do you analysis skill you used in SPSS when you carried on the
research?
questions
were often the same through several interviews so it was easy to
prepare, though boring and not so spontaneous to answer. Questioning
was
not always welcome.
1.you
are given an array of length k and it have numbers from 0 to n (where
k>>>n) in O(k) time and no extra space find occurrences of each
element in O(k) time only2. You are given row and column wise
sorted matrix you have to find and delete an element such that it is
still sorted in O(n) time
All pretty reasonable if you check up on the principles first
Write
a function that takes a position (x,y) in a go game graph and returns a
boolean telling if this position contains a white or black piece and if
this piece is trapped or not.
if you were from mars how would you solve a problem
casual question on behavioural aspects
A test on excel via phone call
No particular difficult questions
Using the supplied graph, how much of X companys net profits came
from the engineering department in 2004?
The questions are not tough. Just because the phone interview is not
the comfortable interview.
Differences on memory handling between C++ and Java.
Pricing strategy for amazon prime (case study)
given
an array of lenght 2n+2 in which every number except for two
numbers
repeat twice each.. and we have to figure out what they are. s (2)
the first round for this position was Written test. Following are the
questions -1. Write a program to find next largest element in binary
search tree.2. Write a program to search element in circular sorted
array3.
Write a program to reverse a linked list in a chunk of 3 . ex. consider
the following linked list 1-2-6-75-33-10-5-3-2 , then the output should
be 6-2-1-10-33-75-2-3-5.i was not shortlisted . so it might help others .

The
question became more difficult with additional requirements being
added
each time I gave an answer to the question under a given scenario. It
started with:1) Count occurrences of numbers in a fileOnce I solved
that the following additional task was added:2) Find out if duplicates
existAfter this, the following constraint was added, and I was asked to
come up with a new solution:3) Assume the file is to big for memory (a
solution in O(n log n) is OK)Finally I was asked to come up with a more
efficient solution:4) Find a linear solution s (2)
Not
really difficult but the one that was asked over and over again was,
If you have to make a decision today, and you do not have enough
data,
what do you do?
No
difficult questions. I was highly impressed by the interviewers
professionalism. She seemed to not ask silly questions like many
interviewers do.
All worthy questions are about javascript rest are very simple.How
inheritance work in javascript, write 2 methods on how it can
work.What are closures on javascriptWhat is the difference between an
array and an object in javascriptwrite a program in javascript that tells
if element x is child of element y (recursion)more javascript questions I
cant recall now.
Not realy difficult, but you need to know basics and able to think in
different ways.
Whats your challenge in this position as you are already an
experienced Account Manager?
Lots
of Tell me a time when questions, they are flexible to switch to
another one if you cannot think of a specified situation.
Tell me about a time when you put customers need before your
companysTell me about a situation when you discovered a problem
and what you did to solve itTell me an example of when you received a
negative feedback and did not agree with it
There
was only one technical question and it was to design a media player
for
a mobile device. I didnt expect it because of what I had read about
Amazon interviews in websites.
Tell me when you were able to change some processes in your
company
Describe,
in as much detail as possible, everything that happens on a Linux
machine from the point when you hit the enter key after typing
./a.out
to the moment when Hello World! gets printed on the screen.
some of the strategic aptitude questions seem to be difficult .if we
arent nervous we can get through.
Questions was rather easy. I guess they put more attention on how you
are answering rather than on correctness of the answer.
Responded to different objections from the client in the role play
Are you looking to commit for atleast 3 years?
Nothing out of the ordinary.
Signed a NDA. But nothing unexpected, and nothing too difficult,
assuming you have been studying.
Find a loop in a graph
They
want they question to be the best solution, need space and operation
to
be the best, if there is a O(n) solution, then the o(n*n) is not
qualified.
3 tech interview round
Given a binary search tree, find the second smallest element to a
given element.
Nothing unexpected
How would you solve performance issue in your application?
The
questions focussed on the 14 principles of leadership so if you prepare
examples for each of these there will not be a question that you can
not answer relatively easily. But prepare more than 2 if you can as in
the 2nd round you may need it to keep the interview fresh. Amazon is
all
about data and metrics. Show you are comfortable with these.
lots of questions from your past expenrience
Asked
question: Using an already implemented method Rand5() that
generates a
random integer between the ranges 1-5 uniformly. Using this method,
implement a a new method that returns a random integer in the range
1-7
uniformly, i.e. Rand7(). Basically this is Rejection Sampling Algorithm.
See http://leetcode.com/2010/11/rejection-sampling.html s (2)
Giving unexpected scenarios to answer.
Prepare very well on SLA (Drill down from GL to all sub ledger
Queries) , TCA & Multi Org Concepts.
questions
wasnt hard becuase open to a lot of answer. I think more details you
give, more positive will be your rating. Question was about Amzon
AWS,
how to balance a workload, how to manage a big web site, difference
between NAS and SAN, how to identify a problem of system slowliness,
queing method, what happen when you surf the web (he wanted to
understand if i knew how http transfer protocolo works).
Calculate the Height of a BST
Programming for manual testers
What happens when you delete the Sysvol folder?
Rod cutting problem on dynamic programming
All scripting and problem solving questions are difficult.
Having a technical (B.tech) background, why are you intersted in this
job.
@
HR round its final round but i rejected & after that i contacted
the HR and asked my reviews she told that i m not good @ Testing
concepts but @HR round there is no matter i still dont knww the
reason
Given
a Binary Tree. Assuming each node denotes some x,y coordinate. root
node denotes (0,0). Write a code to display coordinate of all nodes.
questions related to unix
He asked me to give him the algorithm for the Fibonacci number in
both iterative and using recursion.I failed to solve a problem regarding
the algorithm of a rand7 function by using a rand5 function.
Write a program which do a multiplication without using any built-in
multiplication function. and optimize it.
What
did you do in your b.tech?to test my leadership qualities.I frankly
told i didnt do anything.Neither in organised some fests nor i
participated in any.
The third question was pretty difficult as per me.
There
was really no unexpected question. Be sure to know the leadership
principles which can be found on the Amazon website, as well all the
latest news about the company. They wont ask you about the news,
but
you may proactively without being too pushy throw it into the
interview. Adding to that: ask questions about the company, but not
the
basic ones!
How did you express different opinions to your manager?
It was a question related to binary tree and hashing combined
None
clone a graph which has cycles
What
data structure(s) would you use for storing and displaying the best
sellers lists (there are best sellers for each category and
sub-category)
Give me an example of a time when you had to do something without
your boss knowing
Question Count all lists of adjacent nodes stored in an array
Prepare using available interview books. Sleep well the night before,
and be calm.
failed in 3rd round
Design
an Instant Messaging system at a high level including the possible
number of servers for around 10 million users. The features include
buddy list and presence updates.
Tell me about a time when you did something without your
managers permission (disobeyed).- Suddenly you get to know that our
biggest competitor has just dropped prices dramatically, should we
start a price war?
Anything from Designing to cryptic algorithms
No
difficult question. the interview walks you through the answer and
helps along the way. Just be good at algorithms and some languages
like
C++ , java, etc.
case studies and cross questions
Desgin an LRU Cache
Problem solving
Mostly straight forward competence asked questions.
unexpected voice n accent
There
was no difficult questions. The main problem was that I hardly hear
them, voice quality was very poor and Indian English is something that
worse than Chinese
How you will convince your manager to consider your new innovative
idea ?
No one, they were all fairly simple. Questions related to binary trees
and linked lists.
Algorithm for searching for a piece in an infinitely large chess board
using a knight piece.
There
is no specific question as such which is difficult. But felt little
uneasy when they focus on Data structures for a Quality Assurance
Engineer which is not in my preparation.
i made it till 2nd round, the 3 coding ques were-1- find if the given BT
is BST2- replace every element of a BT with the sum of its inorder
successors3- every element in an array occurs twice except 1, find the
number
Open ended design questions where there is not enough clarity about
the desired output. e.g. persistent structure design etc.Protocols
used for web services in different situations. Found sometimes rather
easily judgmental without hearing to the complete response both on
technical and on managerial topics.
Question was so easy and could be done in 30 minutes using all built-
in container in C++ STL
find missing number in 1 to 1000 random digits.
Writing documentation for 3 test questions took me a big way too long
time.
Given
a n (large number) lists of customers who visited n webpages on n
(large number) days, design a data structure to get customers who
have
visited the website on exactly k days and should have visited at
least
m distinct pages altogether.Was then asked to improvise the solution
as much as possible
Find the max subsequent sum for a random array of numbers s (2)
Given
a n (large number) lists of customers who visited n webpages on n
(large number) days, design a data structure to get customers who
have
visited the website on exactly k days and should have visited at
least
m distinct pages altogether.
Linked List traversal
Time limitation -1.15hr which is very minimal
Nothing
voice round was totally unexpected,
Role playing negotiation exercise.
How do you tackle a problem that arises in a team?
Nah, the interview was a cake walk.
None, simple questions
puzzle
Useless question which are not required for a day to day work or life at
software industry.
puzzle
Business
questions regarding how do you handle negotiations( both internal and
external), case study of real company related issues.
Explain the most difficult manager you have dealt with.
Amazon
started as a place in which you can buy stuff, and they were doing
really well. At some point, they decided to allow people to also sell
their stuff, which was a very risky decision as they couldnt anticipate
if it was going to be successful. Do you consider it was a good or bad
decision of Amazon to start this new business? Why?
To design a model (data structures, what must be already computed..)
for building a T9 dictionary.
Boringly
the usual type of questions were asked e.g. describe a time you failed
at work, or describe the most difficult situation you faced at work etc.
so nothing really original or surprising. My the third interview I had
had enough. My recommendation is to look up standard interview
questions
(read first Amazons approach to customer service as they are very
into
customer service).
Many
of the questions were difficult. They were very specific and practical,
of those that require you to have analysed what is your style of
working and how you deal with things, situations and people.
Unexpected: Write a function to sort 3 numbers.Difficult: Model a car
park management systemTherere a lot of questions about linked list
vs array list
Debugging scenario
maximum cardinality bipartite matching
Why Luxembourg?
Question about priorities sequencing when primary objective was
completely different. A bit strange IMO.
Questions where easy. s (2)
Describe a situation when you disagreed with your manager
all were average
test, leave me alone.
No
real technical questions beyond for example describing how a REST
API
differs from a SOAP API, and why youd want to use the former.
Ive been asked not to discuss this.
Everything from BGP/OSPF/MPLS/TCP/STP
Technica questions about basic things like cookies, https.
What about you?How to find the ip address in windows?
There
are three boxes with apples, oranges and both mixed in them. the
stickers are interchanged. you can only open one box. how will you
find
what is in which box.
Given
an InOrder traversal and a PreOrder traversal of a binary tree, rebuild
the tree. I didnt actually know how to do it, but once they told me
the trick it wasnt difficult to code the algorithm. Dont be afraid to
say you dont know!
The question was to fin the number of time an array was schifted.For
example:[1 2 3 4 5 ] is 0 because it is in order[7 5 6] is 1 because it
should be [5 6 7][7 8 9 2] is 1 too.
a lot of tree problems
I
can not recall any right now. classic questions like: tell me about
your resume? why should we hire you? what do you believe being the
extra
you would bring to the company? An example when I missed a
deadline in
my work or study experience and what happened next?
Did you face a situation where you had to fire an employee? If so, how
did you handle it?
The
language tests were quite challenging, as most of it involved
translating from English, but the language register used is very formal
and tied to contractual and legal contexts. Needless to say, you wont
be allowed to use dictionaries.
Tell me a time when you had to solve a problem that had two possible
solutions.
The on-site case study, 1h30 on Excel.
Logical and puzzles questions
How would you find whether a matrix is symmetric or not
Think
a data structure like Facebook you have connections (with name,
email,
and list of connections) and your connections have connections, print
first level connection and second level connection.
The
questions in the first round were fairly straightforward if you use
data structures like trees and linked lists for your work regularly. If
youre working in areas where you dont use those data structures
regularly, you may find the problems challenging. The question I was
asked was Given a sorted linked list, create a binary tree with the
array with minimum height. Note that the question specified only
binary
tree and not binary search tree.
Do not find myself ethically inclined to disclose questions from the
interview.
Are you prepared to code for most of your work day?
getting the maximum sum of a k*k submatrix out of a 2d matrix.
find the next missing positive number in a unsorted array in O(n)
Why in particular do you want to work for Amazon?
There was this problem solving question on finding out the shadow
length when the buildings were given in a particular fashion
There were no difficult or unexpected questions
Calculate a question over the phone
In PS, interviewer asks logic and then asks to write proper runnable
code.
When did a project you were working on fail because of you?
How did you handle when you design is opposed by all the senior
management and you know that it is right and they are wrong.
How
would you design the complete architecture for image storage of
Amazon.com storage? Another one was, how would you design a key-
value
store? I hadnt worked with a lot of big distributed applications so I
struggled with these two. I had prepared a lot for the on-site, but the
questions were a lot different than the phone interview questions,
which
mostly focused on small scale algorithms.
Optimize each solution with respect to time and space
Implement a reverse hash table s (4)
How to find a string in a large file storage
How can we store the name of street in a map service? Because street
names have characters in common. s (2)
-Name one incident in the past where you broke a rule/law to achieve
something desirable
Find
the first character in a stream which is not repeated in the rest of
the stream. Please note that you are being provided a stream as a
source
for these characters. The stream is guaranteed to eventually terminate
(i.e. return false from a call to the hasNext() method), though it could
be very long. You will access this stream through the provided
interface methods. A call to hasNext() will return whether the stream
contains any more characters to process. A call to getNext() will return
the next character to be processed in the stream. It is not possible to
restart the stream.Example:Input: aAbBABacOutput: bIn this example,
the character b is the first character in the stream which is not
repeated in the stream. s (2)
Write functions to serialize and deserialize a binary tree.
Write a test scenario for copying a file from one location to another
using a wireless connection/
I was asked for a salable solution to index all Amazon pages then
retrieve the pages based on users queries
All were average questions, nothing seem stunning to me.
To write a tree structure in a file and to read back again in any
programming language.
Aptitude question ( may be i was not ready for it) s (2)
Was
asked question about in-order, pre-order trees and how to retrieve the
maximum number of repeated strings in a array or strings.
how to design a calendar.
Code
a method for kindle word spacing, on an actual laptop. Given the
number
of words and the number of space on a line, how to spread words out
evenly with white spaces between words.
Bar raiser round withGiven that the input is a binary tree connect all
the elements in the same level or depth using links.
Behavioural.
Sometimes if enough time is given to think through past experience,
this would mostly be cake walk, be sure to check the leadership
principles before you walk in for an interview!
asked to implement Facebook features.
if exists two values in the list add up equals the given number
How would you find the second largest integer in an unsorted array?
Write the code.
how many piano players play in delhi?
No unexpected question
excel test
There
were so many really silly questions that I could not have fully
prepared for in a million years. One of my favourites was When was
the
last time you asked why 5 times? So, er, exactly 5?
S.T.A.R. interview
A
constellation is a group of connected stars. Given a set of stars in
the sky. Assume that each star takes up a square region (think of it as
pixel). Given a specific star, find the constellation it is part of.
Trouble shooting of web server problem
Nothing very difficult or strange
How will you find lowest common ancestor of 2 nodes in a tree??
build a business case for the pets category, and how to develop the
business in european context..
the question based e in asp.net or data base management
Write
a program to compress text (being as syntactically correct as possible
in a language of your choice) by encoding runs of repeated
characters:e.g. aaaaaabbbcc becomes a6b3c2Also
the graph problem which I cannot remember exactly but you had a
certain
number of spaces and each space could jump a certain number of
spaces
to another space. Find the shortest number of jumps to reach the end.

There was no difficult question. The questions were not that are
typically asked in most of the interviews.
Design a card game.
Was asked to implement some graph search function based on an
existing code base on the spot.
.First
interview asked BST and 2sum in an array including time and space
complexity questions. The second one asked me to merge to sorted
array
and something about arraylist and linkedlist.
Both
the interviews required building these web systems from scratch,
trying
to think of every aspect of the design. The structure of the data
storage, essentially the database design was asked. However,
answering
the question efficiently required knowledge of modern noSQL and
graph
dbs.
All questions were on past work experience
ques on algo ps and data structures
NDA, sorry.
Implement a Linked List
Question 1 / 4 (Repeat characters in a string)You
are given a function findRepeatCharacters which takes in a string s.
Complete the function to print the repeating characters in a string in
lexicographical order. (one-per-line)Question 2 / 4 (Rotate an
array)Write
a progam to rotate a matrix by 90 degrees clockwise. You should write
complete code (including headers). Read the input from standard input
(STDIN) and print the output to standard output (STDOUT).Question 3 /
4 (Nth largest node in a BST)Given
a binary search tree (BST), return the Nth largest node. The function
nLargeBST takes the root of the BST and N as parametersQuestion 4 /
4 (Binary Search Tree to Sorted Doubly Linked List)Write a program to
convert binary search tree in to sorted doubly linked list, Inplace.
Given pointer to head of binary tree
Subroot in a Binary tree with longest leaf-to-leaf path
Name and explain 3 features of the Amazon product page
How to divide a number?
Excel fuctions and macros
Use OO to design shape (The interviewer did not clarify any further)
1. Copy a linked list with random pointer.2. Find an element in a sorted
2-D array top to bottom and left to right3. Find cycle in a liked-list
Using
the UNIX file /usr/share/dict/words that contains one word per line,
how would you get a random word out of the dictionary with the same
probability for all the words in the file? s (2)
Very much in line with the question on glassdoor
How would you implement division without the dived or multiply
operator. This should be as efficient as possible
Given
a set of number ranges, i.e. [1,5], [3,6], [7,9], write a program to
merge overlapping number ranges. In the above example, the result
should
be [1,6], [7,9].
What does strace do?
There wasnt any question of very high difficulty
He
asked the best way to store boolean values on memory. I said an array
but he wanted more, so in the end I said BinaryVector class. He asked
why a binary vector is a better option but I couldnt answer that. I
told him that I dont know the internal implementation.
None
Why
would you use ArrayList? Is there a way to implement the same logic
using just an ordinary array of int elements? What is the pros and cons
in your decision?
What is the P&L of Amazon
Most
of the questions require you to analyze data from a chart or table, the
questions are generally about ratios, percentages, inflation, etc i.e.:
youll be shown a chart with the sales of several companies across
several years and they will ask you Whats the percentage
attributable
to company Y in year 2?
solve boogle using a function
The verasant round is somewhat competetive.
All questions were the same. Either you know or you dont.
if
I want to do DBA work at Amazon? I had to ask what it means at
Amazon
to be a DBA? Another question was about stand by database.
What was your most important achievement in the last months and
why?
They
are so busy to take interview,they dont even refer your CV , no idea
abt your exp or previous job.In teh interview they ask aquestion and
dont pay much attention for your reply
Binary search trees
If you are well prepared, then you can answer all the questions
Given two sorted array find the most optimised algorithm to find the
kth smallest item in the merge of two
Example when I failed
Given your family tree, find all the you cousins in the tree, given your
position.
Given a square matrix, implement a function to rotate the matrix 90
degrees.
1. Design an ordering system.
The
interviewer asked me a question about where I would want to invest
my
money if I had the choice, i.e. which sort of market (equities, bonds,
etc.) and where geographically. It was not an extremely difficult
question, but I think it was relatively unrelated to the job I was
applying for (though it was a Finance Intern position, I suppose).
A system design problem.
Problem solving questions
Financial questions
The
only surprise was at the end of the day, I met with someone who was
not
on the team or in the UX discipline; he noted that Amazon has a team
of
folks who meet with recruits to help ensure a more uniform interview
process across the company. He asked some very tough questions
about my
desire to work at Amazon and was much more probing about my
answers than
other folks on the team had been. Overall a positive experience
though.
Case study not very difficult
The questions for phone interviews are not difficult.
Elevator design
Some Linux internal questions were quite arcane.
Pretty
informal interviews. They want people hard-working, proactive people
who are ready to take initiative. Talk about what YOU want from the
job-
culture and scope-wise.
an idea you suggested that failed
Can you describe your experience,etc.Not so much relevant questions
for an interview, so this is why it was not a real interview for me.
tree traversal without recursion
Algorithms, Data structures.
write the code of inserting a node into a binary tree
Tell me 3 different occasions when youve received negative or
constructive feedback
1st
phone interview was basic questions. Lasted about 30 minutes. 2nd
phone
interview was strange and what I consider to be a bit twisted. My 2nd
phone interview was conducted by a gentleman (rhymes with Bip) I
looked
him up on LinkedIn prior to the call, had my company research done
etc.
Bip had an MBA, but not a lot of retail supply chain experience. He
asked me to help him with a problem he was having at work, the head
of
their division wanted a certain project done, this project would require
an IT system changes. He said that the manager of IT wouldnt do the
project. Assuming since he had an MBA, he had already done the
basics of
ROI, Business Case etc. I began to ask if the IT manager reported to
the head of their division? Since Bip had an MBA and had been working
their almost a year, I assumed that Business Case, ROI etc had been
conducted. Lesson learned here, dont assume. The second circular
question was the Amazon Japan division was receiving too much
inventory
on a particular item. I asked if the fulfillment system was a
proprietary system? He said, yes. I began to describe Root Cause
Analysis to rule out system problems at Amazon prior to contacting
the
supplier. Wrong, the answer Bip wanted was to contact the supplier
first. That was the end of my interviewing and till this day have not
heard anything back from Amazon. There were a couple of other
questions,
which I dont really remember the details, most likely dont recall
them due to the rabbit holes I had already been down with this
interviewer. This interview occurred in June 2012; to date, I have never
heard a word.
Designing algorithm with the best possible time-complexity?
Return the second largest element in an array.
After the tour, they asked what improvements would I make to the FC.

Design garbage collector of C++/

Bay Of Bengal is in which state?
Asked me to design a Banking database and some queries regarding
how to find monthly transaction details.
How do you make a decision if you do not have enough information?
In
my experience the questions were tough but fair, always challenging
your analytic abilities and knowledge of the market & customer.
tell me the total sum of 1+2+3.98+99+100 ?
I
dont understand how the database fits into the product you are
describing. (Comment, clearly the interviewer didnt have the technical
experience to understand that databases are inherent in everything,
such
as logging in.)
a problem similar to 3Sum.
Find the missing card:I
gave an O(n) space approach using hashtables, but he wanted a much
better optimized solution, after some thinking thought of using only
required bits or using the cards as an A.P., however these thoughts
came
after the interview.
what is a fundamental of c programming?
On the spot situation based skills application.
they will ask on deep dive and your technical expertize s (3)
A rectangle is cut from inside another rectangle. Divide the remaining
area into half by drawing one line.
search for occurances of a word in huge list
Given 2 eggs and there are 100 steps. Need to find the step from
which the egg starts breaking. What is the minumum tries? s (2)
Given a binary tree find such a subtree that is a bst. + that bst must
be the biggest bst in the given tree.
nothing difficult
what your favorite course in college
Reverse Polish Notation
Be ready to use OO concepts to answer some very general design
questions.
1)Find LCA given 2 nodes in a binary tree2)Merge two sorted linked
lists3) Print a substring of a given string given the source and
destination indices4) Check whether a given tree is BST or not.5)
regarding Hashing technique
They are the typical corporate questions
Explain buffer overflow
The culture fit question: How the candidate takes the ownership, how
he has contributed in his previous organization
There were no difficult questions asked
Salary expectation? You only get one shot at this and there is no guide
so ask for what you would accept/
Eight queen puzzle
The
scripting standards are expected high but the good thing is, it is of
any language. Being a manual tester it was difficult to write a core
logic. But still I figured out the logic unable to pen down it
The last question he asked me was a conceptual programming
question. Here it is:Given
a 1,000,000 element array of 1,000 digit binary integers in random
order, how would you print it in order, but not necessarily sort the
array?He put emphasis on the fact that they are all exactly
1,000 digits long. After some discussion I did not come up with a
solution that was as efficient as he would have liked, so I dont know
what the answer to this question is.
Suppose
that 10% of the products sold online were incorrectly priced. What
could be a possible solution to this problem and detail out the
approach
youll follow. s (2)
How would you design a file system
Most
questions were posted here on Glassdoor. Just go through and create a
list of common questions. Study seriously for a month if you can.
1. Reverse words in a string I.e given I love glass door make it door
glass love I
Define creativity
mostly questions are based on data structure based, which needs lots
of practice
Given a binary search tree, find the length of the path between two
nodes.
OO Design
SVL Tree balance
Given a function which takes in a 2D point n , an array of 2D points
and a number k, return the k closest-points to n
A question on trie.
Flood filling in 2-D matrix
None.
Unexpected Question: If you can have one super power, what do you
want?
Only from glass door and career cup s (2)
Recursion on Tree Traversal
Implement a stack with constant time min.
How would you implement a deck of cards? Pretty standard question.
They will almost always ask a question of this nature.
The math questions
what price will you charge for amazon prime services in UK?write a
micro to analysis the given set of data .
Asked about Hashmaps and the details of them.
How
would you measure how much adding an auto-complete functionality
to a
search adds to an overhead in the backend. The correct response was
to
measure the delay on the client side and compare the
difference.Followup
question: now when you have a file which contains the delays for a
hundreds of millions of measurements (separate files for before and
after) how would you know whats the difference. Simply measuring the
average before and after was an acceptable answer.Followups included
how to average the top N values from the file and where would
bottlenecks be.
They ask you to write program and read it to them(telephonic
interview)
Find the longest substring of non repeating characters within a string
given.
there
is nothing to actually say its difficult. Spontaneity and fluency are a
must. Pro-activeness and enthusiastic people are more welcome.
If Amazon was considered making a capital investment, how does that
effect each of the financial statements?
interviews were like a conversation more focused on my past work
experience
Had Role play on how to deliver feedback on a Agent. Most of the
questions are on Amazon leadership principles.
you need to be strong in algorithm coding is not difficult.
Write a function to detect if a graph is cyclic.
What is your best legacy in your current work experience.
The
problem statement was basically a string manipulation problem where
in
an integer was to be converted to its roman equivalent.
Asking
to speak in specific metrics about how you improved an event while in
a
leadership/management role. I had to really ensure I broke out
subordinate accomplishments from my own in a leadership role.
Normal questions you can get from cracking interviews
Which is more efficient? Binary Tree or Hash Table, when to use which
one?
Few of the questions were on trees
Business
cases Make an income statement, only operating expenses was
given and
some percentages, a little complex. 2nd case- Analyze some KPIs e.g.
Inventory valuation, Gross profit etc and Deep follow up questions by
interviewers.
Design a data structure to answer minimum in constant time from
increasing of decreasing size array
The question is basic, make sure when you write code, you need to
check NULL and edge case.
Zig-zag
traversal in a BST. I know its a standard question but I wasnt aware
of it and couldnt come up with a good enough answer in the interview
round.
How to determine a binary tree is a BST?
Business
problems are highly relevant to the companys the practice. They are
challenging, and I was often asked on how to validate hypothesis.
nothing specific.. why do you want to join amazon
implement the math.pow function
I
am not going to reveal the questions here. I had heard about the
question that the first interviewer asked. It is an open-ended question.
The interviewer qucikly became frustrated with the direction I was
going and had to rein me in a little bit. I was frustrated about why
then he asked such an open ended question. Anyway, his intentions
were
clear when he asked the follow-up which I found to be an interesting
one. But unfortunately time was running out at that point and I quickly
suggested some ways I would solve the problem. In hindsight, I
realized
this was an important question because Amazon had designed a
product
around it and uses it very heavily internally.The second
interview was about the application of efficient data structures to
solve a problem. I quickly arrived at the solution and coded it. There
was more time left in the interview and we talked about problems
arising
in a distributed architecture setup.The third interviewer was
nice and asked if I needed a restroom break. I gladly took his offer.
This interview was also about the application of an efficient data
structure. I initially proposed a multi-threaded solution to his
problem. He asked a few follow-ups which I was able to answer. But he
eventually asked me to give a single-threaded solution which required
the realization of a need for an efficient data structure. I quickly
realized that I needed a data structure to solve a problem, but he had
to give me some hints to arrive at the right one which ironically was
what I had proposed for the question asked by the second
interviewer.The
last interview was not very technical. The interviewer asked about
what
I did my current role, how I would handle stress, what to expect at
Amazon etc., After the interview was over, he walked me out of the
building and wished me good luck.
design an element system
easy questions all
1) Give one example when you had to deal with conflict.2) How would
you decide adding new content to Amazon Videos?
Simple questions like :1) what happens when a url is typed in a
browser ?? how is the request completed ??2)find all the numbers in
an array that are repeated odd number of times.3)given the root node
and depth traverse the tree and print all nodes till that depth.
Detailed technical questions for a job supporting sellers.
find a relative value in a binary search tree
Q1. Why would you like to work for our company?A1. It is a very
renowned and stable company with very good reputation.Q2. Okay,
but this is from customers prospective. Why would you like to work for
us from employees prospective?A2: Because the company cares of its
employees, it helps them utilize their skills and knowledge and
develop it further.Q3. Hmmmm, what else? Why would you like to work
for us? .
Not too difficult to answer, but it would be good to have answers that
show you have studied Amazon.com
-Read out code for merging 2 sorted arrays to get a single array as an
output which should also be sorted-Read out pseudocode for checking
if a search tree is a binary search tree or not.
Write
code to reverse a C-Style String(C-String means that abcd is
represented as five characters, including the null character )
More
like unexpected ploy: How do you build customer intimacy and then
saying this is not the answer for all possible answers from experience
and michael porter.
Simple
programming questions (count character frequency, find pair that
sums
up to a certain value). Describe how Garbage Collector works in Java.
Questions were average. Following are some of those from my last
interview1. Print a tree in level order (alternate levels should be in
reverse order)2. Find the largest binary search tree in a binary tree3.
find K closest point from a set of n points from a given point p.
There was no difficult question that I can remember.
1. Write code? Inserting and deleting an iteam from a Binary Search
Tree2. Whats the difference between List and ArrayList?3. How to get
the common elements from 2 given lists?4. Whats the difference
between Abstrat class and Interface?
Optimization Problem
Describe a time when you had to quickly make a decision- Can You
Describe a Time When Your Work Was Criticized and How Did You
Handle It?- Tell me about a challenge on a project you faced, how you
dealt with it, what was your role, and what was the outcome- Tell me
about the most successful project youve done- Tell me about a time
when you have been innovative: How?- Tell me about the most
complex analysis you have worked on
Design a stack with any number of queue
What would you do with $100 Million
In a collection of strings, output the string that occurs most often. s
(2)
linked lists question, array questions
There were really no difficult question.
Just
make sure you cover all your basics. They will cover a wide range of
topics to see what you know and how you react to difficult questions.
Always ask to clarify questions since they are usually ambiguous.
Asked very deep questions regarding my previous job and projects,
pace was fast.
Print out all paths from root to leaves.
Find Mode and the frequency
I
have no specific example. Think of the typical behavioral questions,
but be prepared to be asked to go very in depth to each answer that
you
give.
T
first phone interview is quite simple.. I was only asked to discuss
some of my projects I did. Then some simple questions about arraylist
and linkedlist.
The
Bar Raiser will continually come at you with changes to the original
scenario, so make sure you listen to what is being asked and stay on
your toes. And dont be afraid to take some time to answer the
question.
You will not be knocked down for taking 30 secs to answer a question,
or taking time to write something out.
Design IMDB.
Tell me about a decision that did not work in your favor and how did
you respond to it.
Have
you ever dealt with a difficult employee or had difficult end users.
Basically more behavioral type of questions than anything.
What happens when you type in an URL in browser?
Combine N sorted arrays to one sorted array and discuss the time
complexity and space of the Algorithm.
Implement a stack with push , pop and minimum functions
Lengthy and ambiguous
I had to problem solve a scenario relating to seeing unexpected
metrics
What is the big O notation for a given sorting algorithm.
Please try to be as detailed as possible regarding the technical
question, business case, etc.
Questions are usually straightforward, but requires thinking critically
on the spot
Question pretty basic and straightforward. Java : difference between
steve==steve and steve.equals(steve)Write code that finds
common items in two unsorted lists. Whats its complexity? How can
you make it faster.
What do you expect Amazon to be doing 5-10yrs from now?
To secure the code about decrease an amount of money from account
a and increase the same amount of money on account b.
When
I commented on a continuous improvement style used at my current
company, the interviewer ask in a defensive way why I thought it was
better than the way they did it at Amazon. That is not what I said at
all.
Some of my interview questions include:1. Finding the number of leaf
nodes in a tree recursively and iteratively. Comparing time and space
complexities.2. Given an element find the index of the element in the
sorted array.3. Convert an input number to roman representation of
the number.Some theory questions related to stack, heap, BST.
How would you project t-shirt sales of Superbowl t-shirts?
Like I said the questions werent difficult but the way I could answer
them were something I wasnt use to
I was asked to explain the metrics on which employee performance is
measured.
Warn: this is not a real questionTelling me the position has been filled
after scheduling the interview
what are final, finally, finalized differences etc
time is less. i was unable finish coding in time.
Function to detect if Binary tree is BST.
What product area you want to work for Amazon.
Mostly are in the book ctci
How
would you reverse the bits of an integer? What does single or double
inheritance mean? What is the difference between C and C++?
ask
to code a program that multiplies 2 numbers without using the
algebraic
multiplier command. I forgot to include cases where one or both values
are negative.
The safety team asks you to rotate people, but one person is killing it?
What do you do?
(1) Reverse characters(2) Reverse strings
Give an example of where youve undertaken process improvement
and how you went about it.
Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a manager and how
did you resolve it?
I wouldnt call anything in the process difficult. Anyone with basic
reasoning skills and the ability to read should do fine.
The node in a tree has either 5 children or none, given its preorder?
how to construct the original tree.
How do you show trust to your employees?
1. Design a payment transaction system.2. Performance improvement
of a large website.3. Given a sum, find the first pair of numbers that
add the sum in an array.4. Singleton patten. Issue with concurrent
access. Over vs under locking.
How to construt data structures to solve the problem effectivly. Why do
you choose this kind of data structures?
They were pretty standard exactly the ones we see here at glassdoor.
Write the code about eliminating extra space in the string. e.g hello
world to hello world
If you need to do decision in limited time, what will you do ?
I was pressed on how exactly I conducted a marketing campaign for a
business I owned, and whether or not it was a good idea.
All questions were around leadership principles and were straight
forward.
OOP concepts, comparison between datastructures and array
manupilation.
Metrics oriented question. What are the metrics that you would use to
understand the success of a certain product.
Successor
and predecessor in a bst tree. Count matching open, close brace single
threaded and multiple-threaded way. Find a number in a ascending
order
vector/matrix (in a 3 dimensional array)
You
have to be able to prove and articulate that you have professional
experience using quantitative data. Both interviewers asked me totally
off the wall questions based on the genre of books that they market. 1)
How would you market an instructional manual that explains how to
make
horror video games (kid you not). 2) Sales strategy for JK Rowlings new
book
If
I was an engineer, why would I take up a non technical role? (although
a
seemingly easy question, i think depending on this answer, you may or
may not have gotten the job even though every other answer may
have been
correct.
One
of the interviewers is an expert in 3G technology. He posed me a
question related to the inner workings of 3G technology. I am aware of
how the internet works, TCP stacks, DNS, DHCP, and all that I had no
idea what kind of protocols are deloyed on 3G.
You
are given a fixed number of 5 rupee, 10 rupee, 20 rupee and 50 rupee
stamps. Now given an amount for sending a parcel, you should design
an
algorithm to come out with the minimum number of stamps that
should be
used for attaining that amount. For example, if the parcel costed 30
rupees, it could be attained using one 20 rupee stamp and one 10
rupee
stamp OR using three 10 rupee stamps OR using one 20 rupee stamp
and two
5 rupee stamps OR using one 10 rupee stamp and four 5 rupee stamps
OR
using two 10 rupee stamps and two 5 rupee stamps. However, the
minimum
number of stamps is the case of one 20 rupee stamp and one 10 rupee
stamp where only two stamps are used. The case where no solution is
possible should also be handled, for example, a parcel amount of
exactly
33 rupees cannot be attained. s (7)
What
is the most inventive or innovative thing youve done? It doesnt have
to be something thats patented. It could be a process change, product
idea, a new metric or customer facing interface something that was
your idea. It cannot be anything your current or previous employer
would
deem confidential information. Please provide us with context to
understand the invention/innovation. What problem were you seeking
to
solve? Why was it important? What was the result? Why or how did it
make
a difference and change things?
Write down your code on a paper, and read it to me through the
phone.
Nothing special, just some common question.
OO Design
You
just realized that you have double the supply for inventory than the
demand. What is going on, how doo you know you are overstocked
and how
will you deal with this issue?
OO Design with little definition, interviewers English was not good. No
feedback was given on my work.
A time you obsessed about your customer
Most are normal questions. No very difficult one.
Werent
you aware that the organization you joined previously might change its
strategy within the year and your department might suffer as a
consequence? The interviewer also made several sarcastic and
condescending comments during the interview.
Multiplication in sublinear time complexity
Questions were pretty standard; usual graph/tree related stuff
Two
sorted arrays. you can start from any one them, and then at common
element you may or may not jump to other array. Continue in this
manner
till you reach the end of an array. Find the path that results the
maximum sum. s (3)
find the factor number of a number. say input is 6, output should be 1,
6, 2, 3
they
asked a few technical programming questions and i think the hardest
thing was thinking of various ways to raise an integer a to the power b.

Nothing too difficult, basic behavioral.

What is something your current manager/director has asked you to
work on, to correct.
How would you design an Item service for Amazon?
The preliminary testThe technical interviews ( 3 4 interviews in the
span of a day)
Test case for Mobile phonebook
As
I proposed a design for the the parking lot application, the
interviewer added more and more functionalities and requirements
which
broke my design and force me to rethink it again and again
most
difficult question was on infinite array. They keep changing some
information given in the beginning and ask us how would that change
our
solution.they keep asking u did u complete many times which means
they
expect u to code fast
What is the most appropiate DS to implement a T9 dictionary s (2)
They
tend to ask questions about data structures and algorithms. They want
you to think of the best possible solution and you must know your Big
O
notations.
How do you design a shipping wokflow
Please explain when and why you would halt operational process.
Coding at last
 Which is your most important achievement in your current job?
The questions werent hard.A
slightly tricky one was: given a sorted array thats been circularily
shifted an unknown number of time, return the index of the smallest
element.
Most of the questions were medium to difficult level algorithm
questions. Nothing extra-ordinary.
Write a function to find a substring in a string.
A majority of the questions were centered around the Amazon Values
and Leadership Principals.
oop design, design a human body
Design/Write an algorithm to find the most-popular sequence of three
pageTypes in a row.
The hire manager asked if i was good at numbers or not. I said yes but
didnt have good example to prove it.
Explaining the whole code orally.
Cant disclose due to NDA.
Write
an iterator for a linked list. Write the actual code on the board. What
is the time complexity, what is the space complexity
describe tree structure; develop N child Tree; add sibling pointer
Design a filesystem
Nothing really
no really, routine questions.
Optimizing Fibonacci for scale with caching considerations, large
numbers
Code an algorithm to merge 2 unbalanced binary search trees
Given an array of numbers, nums, return an array of numbers
products, where products[i] is the product of all nums[j], j != i.Input :
[1, 2, 3, 4, 5]Output: [(2*3*4*5), (1*3*4*5), (1*2*4*5), (1*2*3*5),
(1*2*3*4)] = [120, 60, 40, 30, 24]You must do this in O(N) without
using division. s (8)
I had a business simulation, a test on Excel (that did not go very
well) and a headache at the end of the day!
Given an array of numbers find all the pairs of numbers that add up to
the total.
How to measure productivity of developers
to describe a eccommerce system
How
youll react and solve the problem if you will have to do three big
projects for three important clients and the deadline is tomorrow
morning? Consider that you wont be able to finish on time because of
the
amount of work youll need to do.
Unexpected
question: my second phone interviewer felt bad when I said that I was
good interfacing with clients. He was expecting me to say that I loved
some code, or something technical like that. Not that I dont like, I do
a lot, but I had to proof that since it was not his first assumption
for a Software Developer.
Coding
question. He asked me few coding questions during the phone
interview
and i was asked to code in a online platform called collabedit. The
first few questions were designed based questions where you dont
have
to code. Just come up with ideas. The last question will be a tough
coding question.
Various
questions about pricing strategies. Looking for more of a
marketing/communications role, thereby wasnt as well prepared as I
should have been.
How would you motivate people in your team?
Given a B-Tree, find the longest possible walk with at most one bend.
Given a adjucency matrix view of a graph find connected components
in it.
I dont really remember the questions but mostly they ask on Data
structures, prepare good.
Lot
of questions on the datastructure might be easier to remember all
those
stuff right out of college but after 9 years of expereince its very
difficult s (2)
Please share one or more of failures in any of the projects you were
involved in? How would you approach the same project now?
Heaps.Design a website which would display the top 1000 amazon
products
Tell about a time when you had to make a major decision but you only
had overnight and no data to back it up?
Design O(1) LRU cache
Why do you want to work for amazon?
Mostly they ask shell scripting and basic coding stuff.
No question really threw me.
Technical
questions came from different areas of computer science: operating
systems, algorithms, programming, and database. The questions were
not
difficult but a quick review of basic topics in computer science would
be useful.
Lots
of behavioural and situational questions e.g give me evidence of when
you have been innovative? Give me another example? How would you
go
about launching product X? What marketing interventions would you
do?
Apparently
the interviewer had also done a similar kind of a project at school so
he started digging deep into the project. This was a search engine
project. He asked me about page rank etc.
Since
you have conducted interviews earlier, what is it that you look out for
in candidates? How do you judge whether a candidate has it over the
interview?
Math
case study was the same as others have detailed on this website.
Dont
just know the answer, understand how to get it because you will have
to
demonstrate it on a whiteboard for the interviewer then the
interviewer
will change one of the givens and ask you to recalculate.
A question on Dynamic Programming..a modification of longest
increasing subsequence problem
What would you do if you saw someone stealing?
I
did not know what is a red-black tree. And he asked me what collection
uses r-b tree. And i just did not know. Didnt even guess. s (2)
They need details of implementation at every step.
coding questions where to implement isParanthesized() method for
and arithmetic expression..
How do you handle under pressure?
Given
that you are working for amazon, you want to know the response time
of
amazon web page for each customer or user who opens it. By
response time
i mean the moment the user enters the website url and presses enter
and
till the web page opens, time interval between pressing enter and
received web page. How will you calculate the time interval for each
user or customer ?
How do you find the loop in a linked list.Write an algorithm to deduce a
tree is in fact a binary tree.I tried my best, just couldnt arrive at the
exact answer.
find words through a grid maze of characters.
You have int a and int b the result should be an interger. How would
you perform the API testing and how would you automate.
I
was supposed to make a method that implemented the Fibonacci
sequence. I
froze up and forgot the actual equation before I stalled and finally
stumbled my way through it.
1.Implement merge sort2. reverse a single linked list
transform a [1,0] matrix grid into matrix grid of manhattan distance
between closest 1s
Nothing out of the ordinary was asked.
You
are given a nxm matrix having unique integers, each column is sorted
in
ascending order. You have to select one integer from each column
such
that the difference between the minimum and maximum of the
selected
numbers becomes minimum.
Nothing out of the ordinary. Some simple questions on time
management, but that is pretty much it s (4)
Algorithm efficiency optimization for almost every code that u write.
No
technical or tough questions would be asked as such. The questions as
based on the how you are proficient with your language and
communication
skills.
Explain the whole OS to a new undergraduate person.
All
interviews except 1 were behavioral. Most of the questions were
common across interviewers: how do you identify issues, how do you
enable cross-team communication, how do you deliver bad news, etc.
Design a consistent ATM machine that if for some mechanical reasons
doesnt provide money, it keeps the balance consistent
algorithm of finding median of stream of numbers
How does a server crash?
Curve balls following the math question require you to think on your
feet so be mindful when answering those questions
Difficult:
Finding a particular combination of numbers from an array with
particular properties, without a floor or ceiling on how many different
numbers could be involved.
OOD questions
There
was a design exercise where they give you an idea and you need to
walk
them through your design process and along the way create a design
from
that idea.
Just know your data structures: hash tables, binary search, b-trees.
How to apply machine vision to a problem not requiring machine vision
techniques.
Finding a path in a maze which is represented by a grid of characters.
s (2)
1)
They asked me to make two programs both were easy one, but they
want us
to make it complete in every sense.i.e. under all input conditions.I
was able to complete that successfully.2)So next they scheduled
the next round of telephonic interview and told me the date and time
of
the interview,but they didnt give any call.
What all do you know about Amazon
Asked not to reveal the exact question, sorry. However, it falls in a
large class of scalability problems.
Two
interviews were strictly problem solving questions, one was a mix of
behavioral and problem solving questions, and the third was strictly
behavioral questions. For the problem solving questions I was asked
what country should business unit XX expand to, who will win in tv,
apple or google, etc. In each of the questions there was a focus on
what data I would need to make my decision. Once I answered this
part of
the question, I was often asked what else would you need. My advice
is to just keep throwing ideas out there and not worry about being
wrong. I think you need to prove that you can keep up with them and
not
be intimidated by their style.
I was asked questions which were totally not relevant to the position.
Describe yourself and capabilities to someone who cannot see you.
Tell me about a boss you admired, followed by Tell me about a boss
you did not get along well.
Feels
like people are picked randomly to give you interviews and have only
hours to prep. Very few questions related to the position I applied for.
Give an array of integers, find all pairs that sum upto a given number
there were no difficult question
Vaguely remember finding pairs of elements in array with same sum
In a hash table, if all the key produced are same, what would be the
complexity
Make a deep copy of a linked list that has a random link pointer and a
next pointer.
None, nothing in the interview was really applicable to a manager level
job.
asked about some memory caching algorithm
4 problems on interviewstreet.com codesprint
Design the backend system and data structure needed for an online
ticket booking system for an intercity bus service.
What was your most enjoyable class of college?
Usual range of questions for NRT tests, with sample questions at the
beginning to warm up before the test.
Create a program that would print out all possible routes to travel
down a 77 chess board
a shifted array of sorted integers (like 8 9 10 1 2 3 4 5 6 7). find the
min integer in the array.
Write a function that divides one number by another, without using the
division operator, and make it better than O(n). s (4)
Explain your experience in analyzing data in order to find the best
implementation.
Experience of online shopping- had never tried it before
If you get an array of integers, find the only integer that is repeated for
an odd number of times. s (2)
One
of the interviewers (not the bar-raiser) asked a very open ended
question about how to design a specific system in a way that could
effectively and efficiently scale to meet Amazons needs.
Why do you want to work at amazon?
Find the longestsubarray which consists of numbers that can be
arranged in a continuous sequence.For ex- {4,5,1,5,7,6,8,4,1}output-
{5,7,6,8,4}.Find the longest. s (3)
k-way merge
not difficult it is easyasking to talk 1 minite abut the topic which
have been given by thm
:if
a train leaves Chicago at 120km/h at 7:30 and another train is coming
in the opposite direction at 840km at the same speed, at what time
both
trains will meet s (2)
Analytical tests was the hardest part (questions required some
calculus with calculator).
Given a sorted array. Insert a value into correct position of the array so
that the array remains sorted. s (2)
What
would you do if you found out on a Friday afternoon that the NY Times
was going to publish a feature on a book currently low in inventory
with
a 28 day reprint time?
In
a library there are N books with the number of pages in ith book given
by b_i.These books are to be distributed among K students such that
the
difference between the largest sum of pages in the books assigned to
any
student and the smallest sum of number of pages in the books
assigned
to any student is minimum for the given input. Also the books are
arranged in a certain order and this order must never be changed.For
example:suppose B[] contains the number of pages in each book.Then
for N=6 K=3 B={3,7,8,2,6,4}, the output will be 0 as we can give book
1
and 2 to student 1 and book 3 and 4 to student 2 and the remaining to
student 3. That makes 10 pages for student 1 10 for 2 and 10 for 3
and
thus the difference is 0similarly when B={3,6,8,2,6,4} then the
minimum difference will be 1 .
Lot
of indepth technical questions to the level of explaining RAIDs from 0
and above including benefits & disadvantages. Project experiences
& company related.
Had
me give key lessons learned on each of my roles through my career.
Given the questions up to that point in the day (How have you solved
X
before) i didnt expect such an open ended one.
An scenario to test the integrity and flexibility while dealing with on job
operational relationship with governmental agencies.
None
of the questions were unexpected. If you intend to interview with
Amazon, do read the questions here and think of how you will answer
them.
1st telephone round:1)about project2)Given BST tree and a value
which is in BST. Find the inorder successor of the given value in
BST.3)Given single linked list. Do the pair reversal of the list.Given1-
>2->3->4->5output:2->1->4->3->52nd telephone round:1)About
projects2)Given an array with size n. Find the element which is
repeated more than n/2 times.3)Design a automated parking system.
You have 5 different tasks (she listed them out) how do you proceed
with your day?
Design for me an elevator !
Asked to give real time scenarios to support any skill set or capabilitiy
mentioned in the course of interview.
Number of squares on chess board
The question on finding time-complexity of a recursive function was
the hardest.
About internal Amazon products solutions
about large data sets
Design a seating kiosk for a restaurant.
Why do the same job when you have done it for so many years
Tell me about one product you like and why (he didnt let me reply with
a tech product).
If you had to decide on how much to charge for Amazon Prime, how
much would you charged knowing this company
Write
the code to read in characters from a file and print out the top 10
most used. What if they are 32 bit characters? What if its a 4GB file
and you only have 1GB of ram?
Given a linked list containing integers as values, write an algorithm
that detects if there is a loop or cycle in the list. s (2)
No unexpected stuff fibonacci, reverse a string, stuff like that. Lots of
questions about my background.
With so many questions, I felt I was using the same examples multiple
times.
At very first started with coding. Didnt ask anything else before that.
Nothing stands out as being exceptionally difficult compared to the
others. Its all a test of concepts and learning ability.
All questions were fairly okay but I was kinda underprepared.
questions about algorithms and data structures, allof them already
here
Tell me about a time in which you challenged your managers
instructions
analytical thinking questions
Was given a business case to solve with what KPIs you would use.
Situational questions.
I was asked to trawerse a tree in preorder which i found wery difficult
using a link list
Unexpected
question was to do a demo training session. The surprise was that this
was supposed to be for a senior L&D posistion and delivery is not
what Sr L&D people do on a daily basis. I could understand if I was
interviewing for a Trainer position. The other challenge was that I was
not given a topic, so it was clear what audience to prepare for. I was
just assigned to do a hour training session in Japanese. The audience
was difficult, one had a go ahead and wow me attitude, while 2 were
polite participants. The other particpiant was obviously uninterested
and brought his laptop to the demo session and was doing what could
only
assume was his own work. I was later told he was pinch hitting for
another person who could not attend and did not understand
Japanese.
There
were some product(y) questions that might be very specific to their
online sales business. Be prepared to think on your feet and dont be
afraid to ask questions.
Recall an event in your past where you had to deal with someone
acting in an unsafe manner. And how you dealt w/ it.
how would you design a part of lucene?
I
have over 20 years experience in the field I was interviewing for.
Coming up with a specific example to demonstrate how I handled a
certain
situation can be a real challenge sometimes.
Gmat type questions
Can you give me an example of x in the form of a totally data-
driven answer?
What is that one thing you wanted to change in the last one year of
your career?
Without developing a supply chain, how could Amazon venture into
Grocery sales in the UK within 1 month?
How would you prove and defend your case for expanding into a new
location?
Why do you think amazon is the best retailer website in the
ecommerce market?
Write code to convert a string to a double value.
what is your current salary?
Describe the product that I will implement?
What are your biggest Failures in your career
How did you deal with an employer that did not follow your idea for
change?
Did
you ever retaliate against your B School for academic,faculty or
cultural issues or participated in a rally against your Institute?
Tell me about a time you went above and beyond for the customer?
write code to reverse string
Why did you leave your previous job?
Given
a particular product that we are selling, we are trying to improve
revenues. We decide to run ad campaign. We find that revenues do in
fact
increase. How can we test, using basic regression techniques, the
effectiveness of the ad campaign?
Implement a B+ tree
sudo ku solver
Tell me of a time when you did something wrong/incorrect, or when
something with the project went bad, and what did you do?
How to improve the system performance?
How
do you conduct a survey to know how many number of cars sold in a
particular city? what are the techniques do you use for the accuracy?
s (2)
Why
did you choose Customer service field when you have a bachelors in
technology with computer science background with a good
percentage?
Feature on A.com and how would you improve it?
Tell me something you faced when you were part of teamsome
challenge
Write a function to find number that occur odd times in input array
Web
service : There are 2 integers int A , int B and they both give the
output as Int . How would you do positive and negative testing ?
If youre in charge of buying decision for varying products, what data
would you need?
Describe red-black trees. Explain how to implement insert and delete
functions on red-black trees.
How do you detect a fraud?
Difference between oltp and olap
What is one thing you do not like about Amazon?
Question in regards to 3 areas that I felt I were a weakness
design an elevator system.
How would you handle a certain situation in which people disagreed
with you on something.
Lets
imagine that you are doing some operations on tables, the server
containing the database goes down, how would you do to perform the
operation anyway ?
Asking to write test scenarios for the copying a file from one system
to other using a wireless connection
Pl. describe a couple of conflict resolution scenarios from personal
experience where you had to lie to make it work :-
Why do you think Amazon has so many different products?
Sorting and acessing elements in a large array (millions of elements)
Write code to convert a Binary Tree into a singly linked list by
traversing level by level.
print an 2D array in spiral order.
Have
you ever received a bad customer service and how would you handle it
if
youre in the place of the representative who made you feel the
service
is bad?
Reason to setup a work location
With regarding my CTC
How do you motivate teams.
Tell me a time you took a product, service, or process and improved it.

Describe semaphores, locks, hash tables.

Breadth -first-traversal
What is our company doing poorly?
What is differeence between hash set and hash table??
latches and mutexes were brought up in detail
Interview Questions
process engineer
Design a system to provide services to users / clients to obtain uuid .
Finding the Minimum Window in S which Contains All Elements from T
Cannot got into much details. Binary Search Trees
Validate a bst.
How to do customer recommendation?
reverse a string
What is soomething negative about you?
I was asked to code up a general regex match function which accepted
* and . are the matching filters.They
provided a long list of test cases for you algorithm to pass,
unfortunately they list a whole bunch that would pass a ad-hoc
implementation. This leads you to a poor implementation if you fix the
code as successive test cases break!Has I paid attention to the
last few at the end of the list, I would not have run out of time to
come up with an elegant solution.
Why you want to work for amazon?
Tell us about a project youve worked on
Tell me what happens in typical desktop PC between pressing power
on button and login screen appearance.
convert binary search tree into doubly link list in constant space and
link list should be sorted
what is hash table?
Difference between detele and truncate sql, types of joins, other more
advanced queries.
Count the number of unique customers
Would you recommend Amazon.com to a friend or family member?
Basics of data structure about linked list.
Write a function to find the lowest common ancestor of two nodes in a
BST.
you are designing an elevator system. describe how and what you
would design.
Tell me a time where you had to deal with a difficult team member
Why did you relocated from your native place to this city? You do have
better options available there. s (2)
Describe a situation where you had to work on tight deadlines
Implement Binary search tree and find the lowest common ancestor
for 2 given nodes?
Java questions
Why agile methodology is much more powerful than waterfall? s (2)
implement queue with two stacks
Questions askedWritten round1.Convert floating number to StringEx
float value 17.53 to string value 17.532.N ary searching in a tree3
Finding the index of rotation in a rotated sorted array .. 1
2 3 4 5 6 is a sorted array and rotated sorted array is 3 4 5 6 1 2 ..
Here the index of rotation happens at 5 position Order of this pgm
should be in o(n/2)My first round was testing which u guys won have
as u all apply for SDE ..
Truck scheduling problem
N/A
How to check if there are any duplicate entries in a file?
Fibonicci series recursion/non-recursionGiven array find two
numbers which adds to given number.
Given a list of unordered numbers, what would be the best algorithm
to find the n largest numbers. s (2)
OOD a student attendance system
There has never been an occasion in which you had to overcome your
managers orders and why?
Describe a time when you improved a process?
They asked if it was important to have a regular schedule.
why you want to join the company
Detect a loop in the given directed graph.
At
least one question involving a hash table. Amazon is famous for asking
questions about hash tables. Either they ask about the hash table
constructs in various programming languages (like Java and Perl, hash
vs. map, etc..), or a coding problem where the hash table affords an
O(N) or O(1) solution.
Workflow problem
To date what has been your greatest acheivement?
How to you motivate others in a group to do things?
check if bst is mirror
Background and work experience
What do you do poorly?
Find the common ancestor node of two nodes in a BST
Describing DNS & DHCP server & How to troubleshoot a DHCP server
Closest pair of points problem s (3)
Implement some classes to simulate a deck of cards.the card class
should have getRank() and getsuit() methods.the
deck class should have a shuffle() method and deal() method. The
constructor should create a shuffled deck. The shuffle method must be
hand-coded; the Collections.shuffle method is not allowed.
OOD of a chess game
have 1 million product id, get the top 10 in the past 1 hour
Print an in-order binary tree without using recursion.
write
get (int i) and put(int i) methods to operate with a queue-like
collection, which can hold only 3 numbers, so when you put a new
number
in the end of the list, one old number must be removed, which should
to
be the least recent requested number by get method.So if you have
a list of numbers (A):237and the list of numbers requested by get
method (B):13294the least recent requested number was 1,but
when you put new number 5 in the list A, you must have a
result375because 2 is the least recent requested number.
Many behavioral questions but they seemed to be reasonable and
targeted to what I would have been doing
Why do you wanna leave your current job?
where have you worked
find out mistakes of a short program
Some Puzzle
None
were difficult. The solutions were the more unexpected. Interviewers
stopped you at an O(n log n) solution without applying slightly more
thought to an O(n) solution.
Are you lucky are unlucky in life
What are you looking to gain at Amazon?
The
initial interviewer tried to shoot holes in my experiences in a
somewhat sneaky way, based on his personal limited military
experiences.
Why do you want to work at Amazon?
What do you choose you major?
What things will you consider if we want to expand in Mexico?
what project you are most proud of
1. String palindrome ignoring spaces.eg: M o m2. Inorder Traversal3.
Find the pairs in an array which is equal to a target sum.4. Difference
btw Java and C++5. Does Multiple Inheritance exists in C++6. Does
Multiple Inheritance exists in Java
Find all prime numbers no bigger than x
find if two words are anagrams or not
Find all prime numbers no bigger than x. s (5)
Interview Questions
Given two strings, write a function that returns the index of the first
match of one string within the other
What is the difference between a risk and an issue? s (3)
A sorted array has been rotated. Find the largest and smallest number.

What is your level of safety experience

How to search a certain string inside a longer string consist of random
data? s (2)
Tell me about software reliability improvement work that you did in
your company
Binary search tree, hash table, search algorithms
What did you think of your college study abroad experience?
What questions do you have for me?
given non-zero number array A, create array B where B[i] = product of
all elements in A except A[i]. s (5)
how much would you charge for washing all windows in Seattle.
what
else could you have said? could you have said anything else? did you
say anything else? why? what did you do after that? did anything
change?
(all regarding my response to when have you disagreed with a
superior
and had to go along with his/her decision?)
Given thousand lists, find the longest common sublist
given
an array of integers(positive or negative), and two integers x, y.
write a function that can find a subarray whose sum equals to x and
product equals to y s (4)
given list of integer duration, e.g. [1, 5], [3,11],[7,20]decide whether
the all the duration will form a continuous duration.
Re-implement the parseInteger method in java
What is your weakness.
Design the class for mobile operations state diagram?
Find loop in a list
How would you reverse a linked list? s (3)
Find the index of an element in a matrix which has been sorted, if cant
find the element return (-1, -1) s (2)
Amazon Video Services question
Write equals for binary trees.
Excel test
Consider Str1 and Str2. Tell me the number of occurrences of the cyclic
substring of str2 in str1.
Complexity of BST best case,worst case average case
Find the k closest points to a target~
How well would your solution scale?
reverse words
Design a stack with min(stack) operation in constant time s (2)
Given
a string aaabbbcc, compress it, = a3b3c2 . Given that output
strings length is always smaller than input string, you have do it
inplace. No extra space s (12)
Why do you want to work for Amazon
How to inverse a link list.
Each
interviewer came from a deferent department and asked questions
from
their area of expertise. That surprised me but I did not find any
questions hard. Just deeper than I thought the position required.
Write a function which determines if there is a cycle in a linked-list.
Given a binary tree, find the greatest possible sum of the sub trees
Print the path of a BST in different orders
Describe a challenge you encountered in a previous position and how
you overcame it.
Remove duplicates from an unsorted linked list.
Write code to serialize and then deserialize a tree.
Find an element in an array (sorted or not) in different ways
Reverse a String using different data structure.
Why Amazon
Find the numbers that sum up to the same value
How would you go about forecasting for this particular merchandising
role?
What do I think about the first Earnings Releases of 2012?
I will say that you need to think about real world situations with
employees. How do you handle an employee dispute?
Introduce himselfWhy amazon?
Team and Business Management
Write the code for the preorder traversal of a tree. s (4)
determine a number is prime or not
Interview Questions
Write a program to sort two arrays and merge them
What do you know about leadership? Can you manage 10- 15 people?
algorithm and data structure
A supervisor making a worker remaining in a path that may injure
them for an extended period of time.
Give me a sentence, and print the sentence reversely.ex. input he is a
boy, outputboy a is he
tell me a time when you had to make changes to a project
Given stream of numbers, how do you choose one number at random.

Why do you want to work at Amazon?

Programming technical questions.
Walk me through your resume
How would you detect a phone number (formatted (xxx)-xxx-xxxx )in
a file that is consist of strings?
Are you eligible to work? Do you have a high school diploma?
Write a function in java to calculate all the possible palindromes in a
string. s (2)
Reverse SList, Elevator design, bfs/dfs, BST
Here
we can have a pretty heavy workload and a lot of things in HR here
come
up very suddenly. How do you handle stress and complete unplanned
tasks?
I was asked to explain my masters thesis work in detail
starting from array,which asked to describe algorithm, then asked Big
O and advanced data structure
Reverse a linked list
How would you select a random element from an array
How would you generate forecast on your product
What data did you use to support your decision to cut a product?
Design a distributed Cache
Name all the data structures you are familiar with and then asked the
complexities of them.
Use object oriented programming to design a deck of cards.
Describe Hash Map, Linked list, etc. Write a program to output int as
string.BST.
HashMap, Linked Lists, Stacks, associated Big O for basic operations.
Hash Map implementation
Provide an example about the task without specific instruction.
If
this company (one we had discussed in detail) was listed on Amazon
as a
seller and also sold on their own website and at a big box retailer
like Walmart, what might be some of your recommendations to
improve
their sales on Amazon?
What was something that you couldnt tackle with? your biggest
failure?
Why Amazon?
How many gas stations are there in the greatter seattle area?
All of the questions asked were within the range of the expected. Know
your strongest language well.
What strategy could Amazon use to increase revenue from sales on
the Amazon.com site?
How can you apply your research result in actual business?
Design a data structure to store strings efficiently for following
operations :1. IsPrefix (s1, s2) : Is s1 a prefix of s2.2. IsEqual(s1, s2) :
Are s1 and s2 equal.3. common prefix(s1, s2) : Return the common
prefix of the given strings s1 and s2. s (2)
Deep probing on object oriented programming skills.
Find nth last number in a singly linked list. s (6)
He asked me about how I had managed teams in some of the projects
that I had worked as a lead
Tell me about a situation where you had to convince others of a
process change?
How will you check to see if two integer arrays have any common
elements? s (4)
what is the use of interfaces?
Tell me about yourself and your weakness.
open question on how to route their delivery
Sorting. Data structure.
Whats the complexity of a SQL select statement where Between is
Used?
How do you motivate others?
Write SQL to Find groups having exactly three different tags.
They asked me about my dream job?
A anagram program
There
is a special linked list where each node have two pointers, one pointer
for next node and one pointer for randomly chosen node. Create a
deep
copy of this list. s (2)
Salary / Background / Experience.
Tell me about a specific time in your recruiting career where you have
been in a difficult situation.
Given
a mutable string (array of characters) of words, how would you reverse
the order of the words in the string, not the entire string. This must
be done in place, i.e. not using any additional memory.eg) Hello
World => olleH dlroW s (2)
Interview Questions
Tell me about a time when you were dissatisfied with your job.
You have a file of 1 million numbers, how do you find the top 1000? s
(3)
Describe how you would handle difficult worker at pizzia shop?
What is cache. What data structures would you use for it. Replacement
techniques
find the closest pair of points in a 2 dimensional space.? write an
algorithm. s (2)
How do you approach the problem you were given
Tell your previous interesting project.
What is it about amazon that makes you interested in working here?
If you were told that your project was cancelled, what would you do?
If
you are 1 month behind on the 3 month project how would you deal
with
the stakeholders? what would you do?Further questions about
dependant
teams and whatnot stemming from the answer. s (2)
Reverse a linked list
What is wrong with this code:int *ptr;*ptr = 7;
How will you improve Amazon?
why amazon
There was a wide variety of questions.
Give a 2D rectangular array represented as a 1D arrary in row-major
form, rotate the array by 90 degrees s (4)
Develop
a general algorithm to enumerate all postal codes, for package
routing,
when passed of country of interest (note: postal codes do not
necessarily follow a consistent pattern or perhaps exist on the
international stage).
Have you ever worked on CPG or financial products with any major
agencies?
How much do you currently earn?
Tell me Something about the case study of CRAZY BIRDS Game ?
What aspect of your professional life/experience does not show up on
the resume?
Design an elevator system for a building
How do you check whether a given binary tree is a binary search tree
or not?
A user at home cannot RDP into his servers. What could be wrong?
(draw out how you would troubleshoot on whiteboard)
Write a program/script for analizing text and counting words with 2, 3
etc. letters.
What is better Google or Facebook?
Implement atoi s (3)
How to implement reservation system?
Tell me about yourself, what makes you apply this position?
This
was not unexpected but a bit difficult. How would you represent the
ordering of a deck of card if you only have 32bytes to work with. So,
he
explained that you have 52 objects, there are 52! possible ordering of
them. how to encode one of those ordering within 32 bytes? s (9)
How would you deal with an unhappy co-worker, client, or customer?
What failures have you had recently?
Write the code for merge sort merging function
Do an in-order traversal without using recursion?
Why should I hire you?
count the number of times a word has occurred in a given string s (4)
What was your most difficult technical issue
Tripple linked list to one single linked list
why do you want to work for Amazon?
The technical interview will include (but is not limited to) questions
related to: Coding, CS fundamentals, Problem Solving,Data structures,
Algorithms and Object Oriented Design and will last about an hour.
Please provide me with some examples of your success in metric
terms (percentage of improvement, etc.)
The questions were very easy, not what i expected.
Whats the background process for a complex SQL query?
Tell me about a time when you had to deal with an employee not
performing their job well.
What would your ex-employers say is your biggest strength /
weakness?
What is the pro/cons of hash tables, trees, link lists?
What was your biggest professional mistake?
shell sort
How would you implement a sparse array (key could be any
integer,but only a few would be used) with limited memory. s (4)
Why Amazon?
When in your last job did you take a risk and fail?
Was tasked to design a class to take on an algorithm problem.
not an unexpected question, but for me, why did you leave your last
jobthe truth is too wierd to believe
find mirror of given binary tree
Given a file find the characters that appear the most often.
Can you describe your biggest failure?
How does LL work.
Questions about hasp maps, data structure etc ( it was a few years
ago so cant remember exactly)
Design Elevator
How does Microsoft Outlook does its updates
Write
a function that takes a BinaryTree and validates if it is a valid
BinarySearchTree. Assume the tree contains no duplicate values. s (2)
Math flow problem was altered as your briefed your solution.
Should be very familiar with each data structure: link list, array, hash
table. Know very detail about how they work.
Provide test data for a program whose functionality is to find second
smallest number in a set s (2)
Why is security important in ecommerce?
How did you use Six Sigma in your company? What projects?
What is deadlock?
How would you calculate the price of Amazon Prime membership?
Why did you leave your last job?
How does hash table works
Tell us abt your experience
Interview Questions
Interview Questions
Given
2 files, each line in the files is considered an entry. Print the
entries that are duplicated in both files such that the number of
repeated entries are minumal. Example:File
1:aaaaaabbbbbbbbbcccFile 2:aaaaaaaaabbbbbbresult:aaaaaabbbbbb
s (3)
What is your weakness?
How would you design a parking lot using object-oriented
programming concepts?
convert binary tree to double linked list s (3)
Gave
a string of characters and asked them to store in a binary search tree
in such a way that it can be extracted in exactly the same order.
why amazon
How would you set up a program
Swapping two elements in Binary tree
Name a time you had to make a compromise and how you handled it.
Design an algorithm to find out if an array has a pair of integers
summing to10.
Questions that were clearly positioned for an internal candidate
If a stick breaks randomly in three pieces, what is the probability that
you can form a triangle from the pieces. s (5)
Based on your tour of our warehouse, what is something that we can
improve upon.
Interview Questions
No questions. Scheduled a phone interview but those guys never
called.
the 3-tier web services. Presentation layer > business logic layer
>persistence layer.
Time complexity of a array vs hash table
Create
the class design for a zoo. The zoo was described as a collection of
animals and cages where multiple animals could be assigned to a
single
cage as long as they were not incompatible.
Refer the interview process for the weird question.
Internal working of RMI Serialization.
dynamic programming, system design
Generate Random numbers without using any external library and
drilling more into Random numbers.
Quickly describe the last two years and what you have done to
increase production or productivity.
Find the numbers occur odd times (e.g. 1,3,5,7,) in the given array.
e.g. { 2, 2, 1, 1, 1, 4, 4 } You should print 1. s (4)
Tell me about the challenge of your current job.
How would you design a game of chess?
Given a string like dir1\dir2\.\dir3\..\dir\file.txtconvert
the string path into an equivalent path removing the .\ and ..\
directories. The algorithm should be in place and linear.
Have you ever had a problem with a fellow employee?
Print the last fibonacci series number that fits in 32bit
not
a question but advice on the test. I am good with words, but my
grammar is pretty shaky (see above!). Really focus on your subbing
skills if you get an interview, the pass mark is very high and it is
pretty difficult if you dont edit copy every day.
I have a file containing below matrix information:3 32 0 00 0 03 0
0First row represents order of Matrix. 2 Start Point 3 End point 0
a city to be visited 1 a city you have no accessFind
all possible ways to go from start to end city visiting all 0 nodes and
avoiding all 1 nodes. In this case the possible solution is 2
If X and Y both have uniform(0,1) distribution, whats the distribution
of X/Y?
How would you create a staffing plan?
You are given 1000 containers of water with exactly one container
containing poison.You can use pigs to test which container contains
poison. The conditions are that: A pig drinkingthe poisoned water
woudl die exactly after 1 hour and that a pig could be used for
sampling multiplecontainers. Assume that the pig takes 0 time to drink
water from any number of containers.What is the minimum number of
pigs would you use to identify the poisoned container within 1