I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
The interview process is a lot robotic where each interviewer will type notes as you speak as if they are paying more attention to typing than what you were saying. The rationale behind is to provide impartial feedback and capture the whole interview session for records. Which is kinda cool as the decision is made collectively. One of the interviewer will be the bar raiser for the role and that person is often not from the same org nor the team making that interviewer interview the candidate from a bigger picture perspective!
I applied online. I interviewed at Amazon (London, England) in Jul 2017
Interview
Telephone checklist. The recruiter set a time for an Amazon manager to call, requesting a good quality line. I made sure I had a good quality landline on my end. Their manager called with a bad quality line - one of those where it cuts out one side while the other is speaking, it was quite detrimental for the interview. The Amazon manager opened the call with a very bored intonation and continued to be quite bored as he ran through a series of questions that were probably some standard set written out for him. He was looking for specific answers, it was not a conversation it was a checkbox question and see if my answer fitted into one of their "standard" responses. He actually summarized some of my answers by reading back the response he felt most closely fitted. This is not an interview process for anyone but robots, if you think outside the box, don't even bother. They're just looking for same ol' same ol'. I was totally put off.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design the first Amazon website. In ten minutes. Because clearly that's enough time to think through how to build the most successful retail website of all time.
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Jul 2017
Interview
2 phone screenings by hiring team comprising technical and behavioral questions followed by 5 back to back on-site interview.
The phone screenings were more technical in nature (mostly system design and scalability related questions).
The onsite interview started with a shock: The person who phone screened me and recommended me to come over for an onsite interview did not even remember my name.
I mentioned I was happy to see him in person. He could not recollect it and looked perplexed.
He probably came up with a prepared set of questions (he had a notebook) which I believe he had already asked in phone screening.
Since they could not be asked anymore, his technical questions were completely unstructured and he had little to no interest in hearing my answers.
All the other interviewers were good to great. The bar raiser (likely) and hiring manager were the best of the lot. They were very professional and their questions were very focused on Amazon leadership principles and technical deep-dive on my previous projects. They actually listened with intent and had good followup questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Can't get into the details since I signed an NDA with Amazon