Amazon Interview Questions
- 1of 1 vote
AnswersDesign a web-site like Paypal.
- hulk April 21, 2014 in India
The interviewer was interested in the
i) Major components & the way they will interact.
ii) Various way of scaling the web-site to support many users
iii) Handling the failure cases like when the DB goes down, etc.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon SDE-2 System Design - 1of 1 vote
AnswersI attended a telephonic round for appstore testing and successfully cleared this round. Following was the First question(apart from tell me abt yourself,etc):
- i_learn April 11, 2014 in India for for appstore
Give me all possible test cases for gmail registration page.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Testing / Quality Assurance Android Application / UI Design System Design test Testing - 5of 9 votes
AnswersWrite a Program for Dictionary which has functionality of lookup and insert . This program should be able to add words on the fly
- Guy February 05, 2014 in United States
I wrote simple code using HashTable
follow up
1) Now we are getting too many words what happens
me: Hashtable will dynamically resize resulting into performance hit . Also they might get hashed to same location as well as we might run out of main memory
2) Okay you are out of main memory , How will you scale this program
me: I will create buckets of HashTable lets say 26 buckets for one for each alphabet and would put them on different machines
3) Lets say you are out of memory on those machines too
me: Okay I need to put them on secondary storage . Here we can have fileSystem or Database . I chose database . I will create simple DB schema of BucketNumber and word .
I will use buckets on main memory as cache , if we are not able to find a word in the bucket then query databse with bucket number and words then remove the least number times looked up word (every time we lookup a word we increament the count i.e value in key,value pair on hashtable) from that bucket and add this word .
I mentioned that bottleneck in this case will be every time a word is not present we need to query DB which usually has high latency which will result into performance hit
4) Lets say we are okay with latency but what if we are getting inserting words between that are only between only in two buckets ex. words starting from a and b only.
Now that I think about it, is it better to do this in a trie? What do you guys think?| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - -1of 3 votes
AnswersHow would you design a social network and find or keep track of someone's oldest friend in a social network? Oldest friend means the friend that you have added for the longest time period. My solution to the first question is to represent friendship in a graph , storing a list of friends in each User object, and use breadth-first-search to find connection. Not sure about the second question though. My idea is either keep a reference to the oldest friend as a member field, or have a double linked list of users sorted by the start date of friendship.
- Guy January 29, 2014 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersDesign a job scheduler.
- shsf January 25, 2014 in India| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon SDE-2 System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersDesign news aggregator like google news, without using pull, push or page crawl. Explain how are you going to scale it.
- shsf January 25, 2014 in India| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon SDE-2 System Design - -1of 1 vote
AnswersImplement classes for a website that can be used for building your own computer in object-oriented design manner. Eg: If a user selects a motherboard, it should filter out all the incompatible CPUs etc. You have to implement various classes that can be used for implementing this functionality. Java preferred.
- Guy January 15, 2014 in United States
Thanks a lot.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersDesign "YOU TUBE".
- iplayilearnkadugodi January 15, 2014 in India
Like how do you upload/where to do you upload/how do you fetch/ how millions of incoming requests will be addressed.
Also take care of things like how do you provide services.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon SDE-2 System Design - 1of 1 vote
AnswersDesign a air traffic control system
- Phoenix July 11, 2013 in United Kingdom for video| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 3of 5 votes
AnswersI was asked to design a meeting scheduler, just like in the Microsoft outlook calendar or the gmail calendar. I proposed that I will create an array of 48 for each day. Every 30 min representing the array entry.
- Bevan March 01, 2013 in United States for AWS
I have to make sure that the next appointment does not collide with a previous meeting.
My solution works fine but it wastes too much memory.
Can anyone please tell me how do I find a better solution to detect collision for meetings.
I don't know all the meetings at the beginning. They will be added randomly later.
Thanks,| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 1of 1 vote
AnswersYou have a bunch of files and folders, Design a playlist which can have any file from any folder and a player that plays it
- sublimedeveloper February 18, 2013 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 3of 3 votes
AnswersDesign a Restaurant Reservation system.
- learner January 09, 2013 in United States| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Object Oriented Design System Design - 0of 0 votes
Answerssend data from client to server using netascii mode.
- a.bharthan September 15, 2012 in India
using UDP.
just implement the sendto() and recvfrom() blocks.| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersLet's say you have a simple function (fibonacci/factorial) that you need to run constantly. The largest number that you will receive as input will be 1,000. How can you improve the performance of this function call?
- Sydney March 02, 2012 in United States
I said not use recursion and cache the results using a data structure (i.e. a Map)
What else could you do to improve the performance?| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersDesign a online Auction system (similar to e-bay)
- seeksree April 25, 2011
Functionalities include enlisting a product for auction by bid owner, Placing bid for a product by bidders,Bid winner selection,Notification of bid winner etc ). Interviewer was mainly looking for Objects involved in the system and their relationship and use of design patterns| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswerDesign a class (OO) or DB for a Video library
- Annoymous November 03, 2010| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - -1of 1 vote
AnswersDesign class PhoneBook. He was interested in data structure and prototypes of different methods.
- HSJ November 02, 2010| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersGiven customer vs visited pages log for three days, find the customers who have visited for exactly 2 days and visited page count > 2. Customer can visit the same page any number of times..
- AmazonPersonalRound July 30, 2010| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersHow to represent a map of large nodes and edge in memory
- AmazonPersonalRound July 30, 2010| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersDesign a web server logging system with 6 remote sites and a main site.
- SK October 01, 2009| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersTelephonic Interview 2)
- The Hercules May 17, 2008
1) Design a Hotel reservation system which will support the following functions.
a) User will get a list of all different types of rooms.
b) User selects a room type & check the room availabilty between the specified dates.
c) User Makes Reservation.
[Discussed about "locking" the room availbilty or not in case if user wants to proceed with reservation]| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer Ideas System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersHow would you design the software that runs on an ATM machine? The software should support operations such as checking balance, transfer funds from one account to another, deposits and withdrawals.
- sn April 03, 2007| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersApp server+DB server, solve the querying delay problem...
- bl February 23, 2006| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 0of 0 votes
Answersthe "logging in" feature of amazon.com has a problem. isolate the problem.
- kunal chopra November 03, 2005| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Testing / Quality Assurance Testing System Design - 0of 0 votes
AnswersImagine that there are 7 servers running in parallel. What happens when you need to expand to 20 live? What are issues? What could you do to fix this issue in the future?
- Gayle L McDowell April 04, 2005| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design - 2of 2 votes
AnswersAlgorithm: You have 50,000 html files, some of which contain phone numbers. How would you create a list of all the files which contain phone numbers?
- Gayle L McDowell April 04, 2005| Report Duplicate | Flag | PURGE
Amazon Software Engineer / Developer System Design Algorithm