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 in-person. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Amazon in Mar 2012
Interview
The interview consists of 4 rounds 1:1 interviews. All the managers are nice to me. All questions are technical. Some are algorithm design and some are system design. You are requested to write code and provide big-O analysis.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2011
Interview
Was cold-called by internal recruiter who was following-up for a tech manager who had seen my online resume. Recruiter strangely was more comfortable with phone than email, so our exchanges took a long time to transpire. My background is User Interface Development, which is all over my resume, so I assumed the position was related given the tech manager's interest, though I didn't expressly hear this from the recruiter.
Eventually we setup a phone interview between a developer and myself, and I was caught off-guard by a series of backend software engineering technical questions. The interviewer was very nice, and we worked through many of the questions together, but I constantly made mention that these were not the sorts of things I deal with in the work I do. The interviewer was decent throughout the process, especially given my bickering about the lack of relevance to my background.
I emailed the recruiter after the interview describing the awkward interview situation. I was surprised to hear back that I passed and was being asked to conduct another technical phone interview. I wrote back stating I would be happy to but only if it was more related to my industry background, which I described in more detail to the recruiter. Oddly, after that I received a curt reply back stating that they no longer wanted to proceed with the interview process. The recruiter just ended it there and did not even try to find me a position or group with a better fit within the company.
In short, the recruiter was not very professional but I felt the developer who interviewed me was.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were in the category of data structures and algorithm --- e.g., searching algorithms, big-O, caching implementations.