I applied through college or university. The process took 8 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Aug 2012
Interview
Submitted resume via university jobs board in July. In mid August, got an email from a recruiter inviting me to a group interview 10 days later. Amazon provided all travel and expenses, including 2 nights in a hotel, $85/day in transportation and $65/day in food. Interview began at 8:15 am, with 24 candidates. Vast majority of candidates presented non-American passports as identification, and only 2 were female. Breakfast was provided, two current SDEs talked to the group and took questions, then we were divided into groups of 3 and presented with a supply chain problem to solve on laptops with clean Ubuntu installs. No guidance or preference for programming languages or problem solving techniques were expressed; instead, they expect your group to come to a consensus, install the necessary tools, and rock it out. It was stressed repeatedly the exercise was NOT competitive, but instead team oriented. A group was put in each corner of the room, and a table of SDEs and HR reps sat in the middle of the room and "observed" 6 hours of work. After several hours, each candidate got a 15-20 minute 1-on-1 with an SDE to discuss the code they'd written (and not much else). The entire process is geared to maximize success for 21-25 year old males and eliminate anyone female and/or older, and inherently makes forming a quick team difficult. It's also obvious Amazon expects that new employees are looking for stepping stones rather than a long-term career as they make no effort to get to know any of the candidates, or identify specific teams on which they may fit. Got a call 2 days after getting home letting me know they wouldn't be making an offer, which was wonderful news as I was completely clear that based on the interview process, Amazon would not be a good fit for me and would have declined an offer anyway.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How would you distribute inventory to minimize the number of missed delivery dates while keeping costs to Amazon low?
I applied through college or university. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Amazon
Interview
Going through my university's career services, Amazon got in touch with me for an interview early in the year. After a 90-minute interview in two 45-minute sessions, the process was over. I heard back from them about a month and a half later, with an internship offer for the summer. I had about 10 days to accept and they covered my relocation and travel.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Difficult: Finding a particular combination of numbers from an array with particular properties, without a floor or ceiling on how many different numbers could be involved.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Amazon (Toronto, ON) in Jul 2012
Interview
Applied online and heard from a recruiter within 3 hours. They had an upcoming interviewing drive. The recruiter discussed with me the position in the Toronto office on the phone to asses my suitability. Afterwards I was invited for an in-person technical interview for the following week.
The interview included four 1-on-1 sessions. Three of which were technical, one of which was more traditional HR (with the group's hiring manager).
The first technical interview was the standard stuff about binary search trees and hashing.
The second one (bar raiser) had a question about path finding in a grid-maze with obstacles.
Third interview had some questions regarding string manipulation in C and finding pairs that sum to k in an unsorted integer array.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Finding a path in a maze which is represented by a grid of characters.