Software Engineer · Phone Screen · Coding

Amazon — Software Engineer ❌ Failed

Level: Intern

Round: Phone Screen · Type: Coding · Difficulty: 6/10 · Duration: 60 min · Interviewer: Neutral

Topics: Data Structures, Algorithms, Hash Table

Location: Remote

Interview date: 2026-01-19

Got offer: False

Summary

I had a technical phone screen for an Amazon internship. The question involved identifying users who have only visited a website once and retrieving the oldest of these users.

Details

The coding question I received was:

Problem:

In a shopping website, to retain churned users, we need to analyze "non-returning users" (users who have visited only once) and provide them with promotional activities.

Core Task:

You need to implement a class containing the following two core methods:

• newUserLogin(username): This method is called whenever a user logs in.
• getOldestOneTimeVisitingUser(): Returns the username of the user who logged in earliest (longest ago) among all users who have only visited once.

Follow-up:

getOldestOneTimeVisitingUsers(int X): Extend the functionality to return the top $X$ oldest, one-time visiting users.

Example Analysis:

User login sequence: john -> jeff -> jeff. Call getOldestOneTimeVisitingUser(). Result: Returns john. Although jeff has also logged in, he has logged in twice, which does not meet the "visited only once" condition.