I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Amazon (Seattle, WA) in Sep 2010
Interview
The process took so long not due to Amazon but because of my own scheduling constraints. I was first contacted early July, and had the first phone interview late July. The second phone interview was also late July. Then the on-site interview was at the beginning of September. About a week after the on-site interview they contacted me with their offer.
First the interview was for a position in the transaction risk management group (what the recruiter found me for), but then also for a position in the global fulfillment platform group. The second position was referred to me by a friend at Amazon because he knew the manager of the group. My first phone interview was with the first team, my second phone interview was with the second team, and for my on-site I talked with the first team in the morning and the second team in the afternoon. The on-site interview was spread out between two of Amazon's Seattle offices. Once everyone moves to the new South Lake Union office this thankfully shouldn't happen any more -- it's pretty annoying, especially when the interviewers don't really know the shuttle schedule that well and you miss the right shuttle!
On-site interviews consisted of one engineer from each team, the manager for each team, some engineers from other teams, and one architect that was working with multiple teams. I think the architect was probably the "bar-raiser" but really his questions were not any more difficult than the others. He did not seem as easy to get along with though which made it more stressful.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Given an ordered circular array of integers, find an element. Meaning the array is ordered, but the lowest element is not at the first index.
Example: array is [5,6,8,10,1,2,4]
Design a system for counting how many times an item is clicked on. You need to record clicks and be able to report how many clicks for a given item. Be able to report which items are the most popular. Keep in mind scalability, since this is Amazon we're talking about.
Design a system using only standard PCs for load balancing. No load-balancers allowed. Want speed, scalability, reliability, standardized configuration for all nodes.
The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Amazon in Sep 2010
Interview
Recruiter called and set the first phone interview within a week. Did well and had second phone interview in a week. Did well too and set for in person interview. Asked question like data structure/code over the phone and relay about bit manipulation like find how many "1" in an integer in its binary form and find nth fibonacci number.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Write code to find how many 1s are in an integer in its binary form.