Amazon is one of the most powerful, respected, and valuable companies in the world, offering a wide spectrum of services covering e-commerce, cloud services, consulting, AI, and digital streaming. Each year, it hires several hundreds of programmers and is widely known for offering lofty pay compensation packages to deserving engineers.
As a programmer hoping to join the Amazon workforce, getting past Amazon’s technical interview is the way forward. Just like interviews at other FAANG companies, the Amazon interview typically tests your ability to solve problems on data structures and algorithms, build scalable systems, and exhibit the right attitude and behavioral traits.
In this article, we’ll discuss everything you will need to crack the Amazon coding interview, including coding questions and tips. Here’s what we’ve covered:
- The Amazon Interview Process
- What Does Amazon Look for in Engineers?
- Amazon Coding Interview Questions
- Strategies to Crack the Amazon Technical Interview
- Take Your Professional Career to the Next Level
The Amazon Interview Process
The interview process at Amazon is similar to interviews at other FAANG and tier-1 companies as far as the coding and design rounds are concerned. However, the behavioral interviews are starkly different, mostly owing to Amazon’s increased emphasis on the 14 leadership principles.
The three main interview phases include:
- The initial phone screen with the recruiter: You’ll be asked general questions on your overall skill set, experience, and past projects.
- The Amazon coding challenge: You’ll be asked to solve 1-2 coding problems where a hiring manager will evaluate your overall approach. You’ll also be asked a few basic questions about your programming language and the concepts you employ.
- The Amazon on-site Interview: Also known as the Loop, the Amazon on-site interview tests your core problem solving, design, and leadership capabilities. You can expect questions around Amazon’s 14 leadership principles during the behavioral interview.
The on-site interview also has a “Bar-Raiser” round, an exercise that involves being evaluated by a member of Amazon’s Bar-Raiser team. This group is specially trained to maintain the hiring bar at Amazon and have the authority to veto applications that they feel aren’t the right cultural fit.
To find out more about Amazon’s interview process, refer to this comprehensive Amazon Interview Process Guide.
What Does Amazon Look for in Engineers?
Well, fundamentally, Amazon expects that the engineers who want to join them are effective problem solvers. Here’s what hiring managers at Amazon look for during the interview:
- That you can think analytically and logically: You aren’t given points just for getting a solution right. Your overall approach and the manner in which you arrive at the solution holds significant weightage too.
- That you exhibit the right behavioral attributes: The fundamental purpose of the behavioral interview is for the hiring managers to understand how you would conduct yourself in specific workplace-related situations. Amazon looks for engineers who display the right attitude and employ the right principles while performing day-to-day functions and dealing with high-pressure situations.
- That you’ve worked on challenging past projects: Learnings imparted by challenging past projects are usually indispensable. Hiring managers are keen to understand what projects you worked on in your career and what your learnings from them were.
Amazon Coding Interview Questions
Amazon’s coding interview is premised on problems around algorithms and data structures. Below is the list of topics that usually feature in Amazon’s coding interview:
- Arrays, strings, and linked lists
- Sorting algorithms — quicksort, merge sort, heap sort, and more
- Hash tables and queues
- Recursion
- Trees and graphs
- Graph algorithms, including greedy algorithms
- Dynamic programming
Let's Look at some common coding interview questions asked at Amazon’s technical interview:
- Given an integer array arr of size n, find all magic triplets in it. Magic triplet is a group of three numbers whose sum is zero. Note that magic triplets may or may not be made of consecutive numbers in arr. (Click here for solution)
- Given a variety of coin types defining a currency system, find the minimum number of coins required to express a given amount of money. Assume an infinite supply of coins of every type. (Click here for solution)
- You are given the root node of a binary tree T. You need to modify that tree in place, transform it into the mirror image of the initial tree T. (Click here for solution)
- Given the daily prices of a stock, what’s the maximum possible profit one can generate by first buying one share of that stock on a certain day and then selling that share at least one day later? (Click here for solution)
- Given an integer, check whether it is a palindrome. (Click here for solution)
- Given K sorted arrays arr, of size N each, merge them into a new array res, such that res is a sorted array. (Click here for solution)
- Given an integer n, find all the possible ways to position n queens on an n×n chessboard so that no two queens attack each other. (Click here for solution)
- Given a sequence, return its next lexicographically greater permutation. If such a permutation does not exist, then return it in ascending order. (Click here for solution)
- You are given an array of integers, arr, of size n, which is analogous to a continuous stream of integers input. Your task is to find K largest elements from a given stream of numbers. (Click here for solution)
- Given an array of integers, find any non-empty subarray whose elements sum up to zero. (Click here for solution)
For more problems along with solutions, check out our problems page.
For more Amazon Interview questions, read:
Amazon Interview Questions
Amazon Phone Interview Questions
Amazon Behavioral Interview Questions
Amazon Onsite Interview Questions
Strategies to Crack the Amazon Technical Interview
As already mentioned, cracking the Amazon interview requires the adoption of a sound prep strategy. If you are looking for noteworthy tips to ace your upcoming interview, check out our guide to acing the Amazon interview with 2 months of preparation.
The above guide also gives you a concrete idea of what your prep timeline should look like.
More so, if you’re looking for the perfect resource to guide you through your journey, check out Interview Kickstart’s 2-month coding interview prep plan.
Take Your Professional Career to the Next Level
Are you set to take your professional career to the next level? If yes, register for Interview Kickstart’s technical interview webinar.
Having trained over 6,000 engineers over the course of 4 years, our experts will apprise you of what it takes to land lucrative offers at the biggest tech companies.
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