Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Amazon with 3.3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 67% positive. To compare, the company-average is 61.5% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
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I applied through an employee referral. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Mar 2010
Interview
The interview occurred in 3 phases - a technical phone screen, a second technical phone screen, and finally a marathon day of in-person interviews. All 3 phases were primarily oriented in a technical direction, and every interview required producing a code sample, so be prepared for that. People were less concerned about what I'd done in the past, and very focused on what I could do right now.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
You need to design a system to provide answers to factorials for between 1 and 100. You can cache 10 numbers. How would you arrange/manage that cache, and what is the worst case for lookup on a cache miss?
I applied through other source. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Aug 2011
Interview
Phone interview lasted about an hour. Interviewer was prepared. He was polite.
We talked about some of my previous projects and used that to discuss issues/solutions
to capacity/scaling and reduncancy. Seemed like more of a 'chat' than specific questions
and answers.
There were some questions about arrays and linked lists. One that I remember was how
to handle a sparse array if memory was limited. Interviewer asked questions to make sure
I knew what I was talking about, but he was certainly not trying to trick me.
He left some time for me to ask questions. I wanted to know about day-to-day life. They
are focused on results and let you manage your time - very flexible on work from home.
They provide a platform of your choice (Windows, Mac, Linux).
Overall, the interviewer was someone I would like to have a beer with, and the company
is a place I would like to work (hope they are reading this :-)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you implement a sparse array (key could be any integer,
but only a few would be used) with limited memory.