I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Feb 2013
Interview
I had my resume referred into Amazon's university recruitment system, and received an email confirmation letting me know they had received my resume and they would contact me if any positions seemed like a match. I then received an email from a recruiter letting me know they wanted to do a 45-minute phone interview.
After setting up the date and time, the phone interview seemed to go by very fast. The interviewer asked some general getting-to-know you questions, and then directed me to go to a weblink with a shared document. He posted the question, "Implement a stack." I coded in Java and explained what I was doing as I was doing it, and he was very helpful and edited a few minor typos that I made. Then he asked me how I would add a getMinimum function to the stack. I had heard the problem before, so I told him that and explained what my solution would be, and then coded it up. He asked me a time-complexity question related to my stack, which I answered, and then I had five minutes (or less!) to ask him questions.
A few days after the phone interview, I was contacted by my recruiter to set up an in-person interview. We set up a date and time. On the day, I had six interviews, four of them technical. One of my non-technical interviews was during lunch with one of the managers for the team that was offering the position, and I was able to ask him as many questions as I wanted before he asked me any questions. The only other non-technical interview was with a technical accountant (? I don't remember his position) not on the team, and he asked me general interview questions, like, "What's been your most difficult problem?" and "Have you ever had to anticipate what a customer wants or needs?" All the interviewers were very friendly and gave helpful suggestions. They also gave at least five minutes (often more) to let me ask my own questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Made a "deep copy" function for the following class:
public class Node {
public String data;
public List<Node> chain;
}
By "deep copy" he meant that each node in the chain needs to be a fresh copy, not the original nodes. That way modifying the original node will not change the copy in any way.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (San Diego, CA) in Nov 2012
Interview
I saw amazon at UCSD career fair (DECAF). I talked to an engineer and he asked me to describe round robin. I answered the questions and a week later I got a request to do a phone interview.
The first phone interview went well. The interviewer asked me an algorithm question regarding finding duplicates in a list. He had me write it out on paper. When I was done, I read him the code (in java). Basically I used a hashmap to store values in the list, if a duplicate was found the value in the map was increased upon entry. It was pretty straight forward. There was one other restriction but I can't remember. (sorry)
The second phone interview was with a senior level engineer. He asked much more difficult questions and didn't allow much time to process the question or do the alogrithms. The coding was done via an online collaboration tool. He wrote some method headers and I filled them in. He really was pushing the pace, wouldn't let me think much about the problems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a spase matrix, create a class that would:1. have a method to take the sparse matrix and put into a more efficient data structure. 2. retreive data from the data structure. 3. Use a data structure that would produce an iterator that keeps track of the order in which the entries were added.
I was given a class for the data type (xi, xj, value).
I applied through college or university. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
Applied through college career website. I had two phone interviews, each for 45 minutes. I thought I did well but after a few days, I received their rejection email.