I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Sep 2012
Interview
A recruiter contacted me through LinkedIn and informed me about a recruiting event for Amazon's eCommerce Platforms Division taking place in my area in a month. I was surprised that Amazon would fly interviewing teams to different cities for recruitment (the usual process is for them to invite candidates to Seatlle). I expressed interest and the recruiter asked me to go through a phone screen as early as possible because the interview slots were filling up. The interview team was going to be in my city only for two days.
I setup the phone interview for the same day. The phone screen as quick and the interviewer asked me a somewhat difficult question that I did not expect interviewers to ask during a phone interview. He indicated that I need not code and that he wanted to just hear how I would solve the problem. Fortunately for me, the insight on how to solve came pretty quickly and the interviewer seemed happy.
After three days, I contacted the interviewer about my phone interview and he gave the good news that I had cleared it and that I would take part in the recruiting event in my city. He said he would contact me about exact date and time in the next few days which he did.
The interview took place in a building in a famous area that Amazon must have leased for the event. My interview loop consisted of a 15 minute intro by the recruiter (different from the one who contacted me through LinkedIn) followed by three 45 minute technical interview and one 45 minute hiring manager interview. I thought I screwed up the first one and did well on the other two technical interviews. The last one was not a technical, the questions were more about how I would handle stress, what to expect at Amazon etc.,
The recruiter said that Amazon typically moves very quickly if they like a candidate and asked me to expect an email the same day (Friday) or by Sunday latest. The email finally arrived on Sunday with good news after an agonizing wait.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I am not going to reveal the questions here. I had heard about the question that the first interviewer asked. It is an open-ended question. The interviewer qucikly became frustrated with the direction I was going and had to rein me in a little bit. I was frustrated about why then he asked such an open ended question. Anyway, his intentions were clear when he asked the follow-up which I found to be an interesting one. But unfortunately time was running out at that point and I quickly suggested some ways I would solve the problem. In hindsight, I realized this was an important question because Amazon had designed a product around it and uses it very heavily internally.
The second interview was about the application of efficient data structures to solve a problem. I quickly arrived at the solution and coded it. There was more time left in the interview and we talked about problems arising in a distributed architecture setup.
The third interviewer was nice and asked if I needed a restroom break. I gladly took his offer. This interview was also about the application of an efficient data structure. I initially proposed a multi-threaded solution to his problem. He asked a few follow-ups which I was able to answer. But he eventually asked me to give a single-threaded solution which required the realization of a need for an efficient data structure. I quickly realized that I needed a data structure to solve a problem, but he had to give me some hints to arrive at the right one which ironically was what I had proposed for the question asked by the second interviewer.
The last interview was not very technical. The interviewer asked about what I did my current role, how I would handle stress, what to expect at Amazon etc., After the interview was over, he walked me out of the building and wished me good luck.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Nov 2012
Interview
I had had two phone screen interviews before I went to Seattle for my onsite interview. The phone interviews were 45 minutes each and the onsite interview had 5 rounds, each about 50 minutes. It seemed that amazon was lack of software engineers because I had seen a lot of candidates. In onsite interview, I was staying in a conference room for one day except for a lunch interview. The interviewers came to the conference according to the schedule. It was a fantastic experience but I didn't not get an offer.