Surprisingly easy — I expected tougher questions, but the coding round felt more like a warm-up. The main challenge was a DSA problem about counting islands in a 2D grid, which led to a discussion on DFS versus BFS and handling large grids. Funny enough, I had revisited that exact type of question while prepping on PracHub, which made me feel more confident. The interview wrapped up with a behavioral round, and I accepted an offer, but ultimately decided to decline it for another opportunity. Overall, it was a smooth experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Number of Islands — given a 2D grid of '1's (land) and '0's (water), count the number of connected islands. Walk through DFS vs BFS, and discuss how to avoid revisiting cells (in-place mutation vs visited set) and what changes if the grid is huge and must stream from disk.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Mar 2014
Interview
I interviewed with Amazon for a Summer Internship. The process took less than 3 weeks. I had two back-to-back 45 minute phone-interviews scheduled. Within a week I was informed of the decision.
The questions were of average difficulty. They were mostly looking for strong Computer Science fundamentals. The first interviewer was interested in details of one of my projects. He then moved on to asking me a few fundamental questions about inheritance. The coding problem involved merging two unsorted strings. The interviewer was also interested in questioning me on how the code would scale if the strings grow to large.
The second interview was more grilling, the interviewer gave me a situation where a web server not performing as expected and wanted me to dive deep into deciphering what all could have gone wrong. I was then asked to implement 'toString' Java API.
It started with an OA, and then after a few weeks, I got invited to four rounds of interviews: technical and behavioral at 3 of the 4, and behavioral only at one.
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (Calgary, AB) in Jun 2026
Interview
Online Assessment is the first step in the process. I didn’t have an HR phone screening and went straight to the OA after applying. It was sent to me about a week after I submitted my application.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The first question is LeetCode style algorithms question, and the second question gives a full stack repo (choice of Java, NodeJS, or Django) and asks to solve a backend issue which is causing a bug in the frontend. Unit tests must pass to pass the second question. You can run both backend/frontend indivdually or together