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 college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Mar 2011
Interview
Not much to say. Applied through college career board, then got a 1:1 interview scheduled on campus. If I had cleared this interview, there were 4-5 more scheduled during following days. But I didn't make it.
The interviewer did not look interested at all. Gave me a weird problem to solve, didn't provide much help and worked on his laptop while I was solving it. The problem related to distinguishing company employees from outside visitors when someone hits a website. Eventually it boiled down to IPs, strings, hash tables, etc.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Refer the interview process for the weird question.
The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Apr 2011
Interview
Amazon was extremely prompt and speedy with its interview process. The only reason it took 3 months is because I was in China for 2.5 months, and unable to do an on-site interview until I got back.
The interview process consisted of 3 phone interviews of 45~60 minutes each (normally would be 2 I believe), as well as an on-site interview, which was 5 separate 45 minute interviews.
There was maybe a week or two between phone interviews, and they gave me an offer the Monday after my on-site interview (which was a Friday). I had the typical two weeks to decide, and the recruiters & interviewers were helpful in answering follow-up questions after the interviews.
The interviewers were all Software Engineers, and were all extremely bright, nice, and energetic. They were very helpful in pointing out better directions for solutions to problems that I presented, and were willing to engage in discussions about why certain methods were better or worse. They were all answered any questions I had thoroughly. Additionally, I was actually interviewing with a few of the team members (including the would-be boss and the would-be boss's boss), so I was able to get a very good sense of what the projects I would be working on.
The Amazon campus in Seattle, Washington is amazing. It's located right next to downtown, in some bright, shiny new buildings. It's very close to very good urban residential neighborhoods. They have a full-sized gym, locker rooms, showers, a cafe, on-site parking, and are VERY close to mass transit.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Given a binary tree with only upwards (parent) node references, re-construct the tree adding in child references. You are given a list of leaf nodes (sorted in left to right order). Tricks include making sure to account for extremely unbalanced trees.
Additional questions included a variety of algorithm questions including sorting, searching, and graph questions. Solutions typically required use of heap, linked list, queue, hash table (ALWAYS THINK HASH TABLE FIRST), and graph data structures. Almost all questions included run-time analysis and optimization follow-ups.
There were also more high-level design questions, as well as a couple of straight up math problems (pretty easy though).
The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon in Feb 2011
Interview
Originally received an email from a recruiter asking for my updated resume. They asked for a list of times that worked better for me and a couple days later they had a phone interviewed scheduled.
Recruiter was very helpful at clarifying questions about the process and replied to emails on a timely manner. I even received emails from him in the middle of the night.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
The interview started with normal behavioral questions, such as what type of technology do you like the most, what do you not like, why do you want to work for amazon and so on. Then the interview moved to technical questions and then programming questions. The first programming question I was asked was "Assuming a valid binary tree, write a function to insert a new node into the tree"
the second question was a little tougher, "Write a function that checks whether a binary tree is valid or not. A valid binary tree is a tree where no child node points to any of its ancestors"