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Thank you taking the time to speak with us.
The below tips are intended to enhance your candidate experience.
Amazon—a place where builders can build. We hire the world's brightest minds and offer them an
environment in which they can invent and innovate to improve the experience for our customers. We want
employees who will help share and shape our mission to be Earth's most customer-centric company.
Amazon's evolution from Web site, to e-commerce partner, to development platform, is driven by the spirit of
invention that is part of our DNA. We do this every day by solving complex technical and business problems
with ingenuity and simplicity. We're making history, and the good news is that we've only just begun.
Work hard. Have fun. Make history.
Our engineers tackle some of the most complex challenges in large-scale computing. Software development engineers,
technical program managers, test engineers, and user-interface experts work in small teams across the company to
contribute to the e-commerce platform that's used by:
Over 152 million active Amazon customer accounts
Over 2 million active seller accounts
Hundreds of thousands of external developers
Phone Interview Tips
Technical Topics to Review
Programming Languages
We do not require that you know any specific programming language before interviewing for a technical position with
Amazon, but familiarity with a prominent language is generally a prerequisite for success. Not only should you be familiar
with the syntax of a language like Java, Python, C#, C/C++, or Ruby, you should be familiar with some of the languages’
nuances, such as how memory management works, or the most commonly used collections or libraries, etc.
Data Structures
Most of the work we do involves storing and providing access to data in efficient ways. This necessitates a very strong
background in data structures. You’ll be expected to understand the inner workings of common data structures and be able
to compare and contrast their usage in various applications. You will be expected to know the runtimes for common
operations as well as how they use memory. Wikipedia is a great resource for brushing up on data structures.
“Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual
consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks ...
walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you've stumbled into a
computer science lecture.”
- Jeff Bezos, 2010 Shareholder letter
Algorithms
Your interview with Amazon will not be focused on rote memorization of algorithms; however, having a good
understanding of the most common algorithms will likely make solving some of the questions we ask a lot easier. Consider
reviewing traversals, divide and conquer, and any other common algorithms you feel might be worth brushing up on. For